PAlEt 

CONTEMPORARY    MEN 
OF    LETTERS    SERIES 

EDITED    BY 
WILLIAM    ASPENWALL    BRADLEY 


WALTER   PATER 


^ 


im 


I 


WALTER    PATER 


BY    FERRIS    GREENSLET 


Contempordrif 


Mi'v  of  Lette,T» 


NEW    YORK 

McCLURE,    PHILLIPS    <^-    CO 

MCMV 


Copyright,  1903,  by 
McCLURE,  PHILLIPS  &  CO. 


Published,   October,    1903,   N 


PREFATORY  NOTE    =  ;"~-- 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

This  brief  study  of  the  hfe  and  work 
of  Walter  Pater  does  not  pretend  to  be 
the  "verdict  of  posterity,"  for  it  has  to 
do  with  an  author  whose  personal  influ- 
ence is  still  active  in  contemporary  litera- 
ture. Yet  perhaps  in  dealing  with  such 
a  person  as  Pater,  who  is  notable  chiefly 
for  literary  and  scholarly  labors,  spatial 
distance  may  afford  something  of  the  per- 
spective usually  given  only  by  remoteness 
in  time.  In  any  case  Pater  is  the  last 
man  in  the  world  to  be  made  the  subject 
of  Boswellian  biography.  I  have  tried 
here  to  make  him,  so  far  as  possible,  his 
own  interpreter;  and  I  have  hoped  by 

fvii] 


PREFATORY   NOTE 
quotation,    frequent   and   unashamed,   to 
convey  some  intimation  of  his  quaUty. 

As  Pater's  career  was  so  essentially  a 
matter  of  "mere  literature,"  I  have  been 
at  some  pains  to  make  the  Chronology 
which  is  appended  a  complete  and  accu- 
rate bibliography  of  his  writings.  In 
preparing  this  I  have  been  aided  by  Mr. 
Shadwell's  list  prefixed  to  the  "Miscel- 
laneous Studies"  and  by  the  lists  of 
Pater's  review  articles  contained  in  the 
Athenceum's  review  of  the  first  English 
edition  of  the  "Essays  from  the  Guar- 
dian." 

F.  G. 

Boston,  June,  1903. 


[  viii  ] 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.    A  Child  in  the  House 3 

II.    Oxford 17 

HI.    Criticism  of  Art  and  LKrrERs      .     .      38 

IV.    Philosophic  Fiction  and  the  Art  of 

Style 73 

V.    "The  New  Cyrenaicism  "     .     .     .     .102 

VI.    Last  Years 139 

Chronology 153 


PREFATORY   NOTE 
quotation,    frequent   and   unashamed,   to 
convey  some  intimation  of  his  quahty. 

As  Pater's  career  was  so  essentially  a 
matter  of  "mere  literature,"  I  have  been 
at  some  pains  to  make  the  Chronology 
which  is  appended  a  complete  and  accu- 
rate bibliography  of  his  writings.  In 
preparing  this  I  have  been  aided  by  INIr. 
Shadwell's  hst  prefixed  to  the  "Miscel- 
laneous Studies"  and  by  the  lists  of 
Pater's  review  articles  contained  in  the 
Athenceum's  review  of  the  first  English 
edition  of  the  "Essays  from  the  Guar- 
dian." 

F.  G. 

Boston,  June_,  1903. 


[  viii  ] 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.    A  Child  in  the  House 3 

II.    Oxford 17 

III.  Criticism  of  Art  and  Lkiters      .     .      38 

IV.  Philosophic  Fiction  and  the  Art  of 

Style 73 

V.    "The  New  Cyrenaicism  "     .     .     ,     .102 

VI.    Last  Years 139 

Chronology 153 


WALTER   PATER 


WALTER    PATER 


When  I  read  the  book,  the  biography  famous. 
And  is  this,  then,  (said  I)  what  the  author  calls 

a  man's  life? 
And  so  will  someone  when  I  am  dead  and  gone 

write  my  life? 
(As  if  any  man  really  knew  aught  of  my  life; 
Why,  even  I  myself,  I  often  think,  know  little  or 

nothing  of  my  real  life; 
Only  a  few  hints — a  few  diffused,  faint  clues  and 

indirections 
I  seek  for  my  own  use  to  trace  out  here.)" 

Whitman. 


A    CHILD    IN    THE    HOUSE 

The  writer  of  biography  who  can  mus- 
ter the  strength  of  mind  sometimes  to 
leave  his  shop,  and  in  the  open  to  medi- 
tate upon  his  trade,  must  often  be  abashed 
at  its  facile  presumptions.  If  he  strive 
to  recall  the  flow  of  his  own  life,  he  will 
find  that  it  has  been  full  of  mystery  to 
himself  —  and  to  others,  to  his  friends 
even,  or  to  his  very  housemates,  much 
more  mysterious.  How  hardly,  then, 
shall  he  explain  the  life  of  one  whom  he 
has  never  seen,  who  lived  perhaps  in  a 
far  land,  in  other  times,  amid  an  alien 

[3] 


WALTER  PATER 
people.  Yet  so  assured  are  men  of  the 
resurrective  power  of  literary  scholarship 
that  they  have  not  hesitated  to  attempt 
the  recall  of  such  remote  and  misty  per- 
sons as  Abelard  or  Zoroaster.  But,  after 
he  has  once  felt  this  sense  of  futility,  the 
biographer  will  always  wish  to  make  some 
preliminary  reservation.  He  will  under- 
take to  deal  fairly  with  his  reader,  to  be 
diligent  in  gathering  knowledge  of  his 
subject,  to  order  it  carefully,  to  ponder  it 
strictly  and  sympathetically;  but  he  will 
not  undertake  to  portray  the  elusive  per- 
sonality in  all  its  fulness.  Such  reserva- 
tion as  this  is  especially  needful  in  the 
case  of  a  man  like  Walter  Pater.  His 
life  was  self-contained,  subjective,  sta- 
tionary; it  was  a  life  of  academic  amen- 

[4] 


A  CHILD  IN  THE  HOUSE 
ity,  singularly  devoid  of  the  "rubs,  doub- 
lings, and  wrenches"  which  afford  the 
biographer  his  best,  most  picturesque  op- 
portunity. The  annals  of  it  are  short, 
and,  if  confined  to  external  happenings, 
simple.  But  the  interpretation  of  them 
is  a  more  difficult  affair.  If  we  can 
capture  some  clews  and  hints  of  charac- 
ter, however  diffused  and  indirect,  if  we 
can  partially  apprehend  a  fugitive  and 
recondite  but  strangely  effective  literary 
personality,  we  shall  be  fortunate. 

It  is,  perhaps,  significant  that  Walter 
Pater,  one  of  the  most  minutely  labori- 
ous of  English  writers,  should  have  been 
of  Dutch  extraction;  for  in  all  Low 
Country  workmanship  he  was  to  recog- 
nise   a    "minute    and    scrupidous    air    of 

[5] 


WALTER  PATER 
care-taking  and  neatness."  In  the  eigh- 
teenth century  the  Paters  had  migrated 
from  Holland  to  England,  intermarried 
with  their  English  compeers,  and  become 
known  as  a  highly  respectable  family  of 
the  middle  class.  Early  in  the  last  cen- 
tury Richard  Glode  Pater,  the  father  of 
our  author,  was  born,  by  the  chances  of 
travel,  in  New  York.  Taken  back  to 
England  while  still  a  young  boy,  he  was 
in  due  time  married  to  Maria  Hill,  a 
north  country  girl,  and  settled  in  life  as 
a  physician.  In  his  career  one  thing  is 
especially  to  our  purpose.  For  genera- 
tions before  him  the  Pater  family  had 
adhered  piously  to  an  extraordinary  cus- 
tom. There  would  seem  to  have  been 
some  ancient  division  of  religious  senti- 

[6] 


A  CHILD  IN  THE  HOUSE 
ment  between  the  Paters  and  their  Eng- 
Hsh  wives.  In  consequence  of  this  the 
male  children  of  the  family  were  inva- 
riably reared  as  ffood  Catholics,  while 
the  daughters,  quite  as  invariably,  were 
brought  up  in  the  Anglican  communion. 
Early  in  his  life  Dr.  Richard  Glode 
Pater  left  the  Church  of  Rome  to  take 
up  no  other  connection.  Thus  his  sons, 
with  the  ancient  tradition  of  the  Church 
of  Rome  in  their  mental  heritage,  were 
the  first  of  the  family  to  be  educated  out 
of  Catholicism. 

Walter  Horatio  Pater,  the  second  of 
four  children,  was  born  at  Shadwell  in 
the  East  Qf  liondon,  on  the  fourth  of 
August,  1839.  Not  long  after  this  event 
Dr.  Pater  moved  with  his  household  to 


WALTER  PATER 
Enfield,  in  Middlesex,  some  four  leagues 
from  London,  and  it  was  there  that 
Walter  Pater  passed  the  better  part  of 
his  youth.  Of  his  earliest  childhood 
there  are  few  facts  of  sufficient  im- 
portance to  be  reported.  It  will  not 
do,  however,  to  overlook  a  strange  and 
pretty  game  described  by  Mr.  Edmund 
Gosse  as  much  beloved  by  the  Pater  chil- 
dren. This  would  seem  to  have  been  a 
kind  of  make-believe  mass  or  other  ritu- 
alistic ceremonial,  in  which  the  young 
Walter,  arrayed  in  an  improvised  dal- 
matic, with  sedate  dignity  and  hieratic 
solemnity  of  demeanour,  would  always  be 


But  although  the  chronicle  of  events 
in  ]Mr.  Pater's  life  would  have  perforce 

[8] 


A  CHILD  IN  THE  HOUSE 
to  leap  from  his  birth  to  his  fourteenth 
year,  it  is,  perhaps,  not  too  fanciful  to 
find  in  that  imaginative  study  of  the 
psychology  of  youth,  "The  Child  in  the 
House,"  some  hints  of  certain  very  real 
influences  in  his  own  childhood.  To  be- 
gin with  the  more  tangible  things:  that 
"white  Angora  with  a  dark  tail  like  an 
ermine's,  and  a  face  like  a  flower,  who 
fell  into  a  lingering  sickness  and  became 
quite  delicately  human  in  its  valetudina- 
rianism, and  came  to  have  a  hundred 
different  expressions  of  voice,"  must 
surely  have  arched  her  dainty  way  in 
visible,  purring,  feline  presence  through 
the  old  house  at  Enfield.  And  it  is 
hard  to  believe  that  the  peculiarly  in- 
timate  realisation   of   a   kind   of  mystic 

[9] 


WALTER  PATER 
personality  in  the  house  itself,  so  vital 
a  charm  in  this  study  and  so  often  re- 
current in  his  other  work,  had  no  pro- 
totype in  the  thoughts  of  young  Pater. 
To  any  sensitive  child,  of  course,  the 
home,  with  its  multitudinous  objects  and 
manifold  associations,  will  seem  a  part  of 
himself,  a  second  and  more  comprehen- 
sive "me."  So  far  "The  Child  in  the 
House"  is  but  a  study  in  the  paganism 
of  young  minds;  yet  here  and  there  are 
suggestions  of  that  almost  hypersesthetic 
sensitiveness  that  we  associate  with  Pater, 
which  seem  to  give  to  it  a  clear  personal 
reference.  No  one  is  likely  to  doubt  that 
in  such  passages  as  this  there  is  a  core  of 
reminiscence : 

"From  this  point  he  could  trace  two 

[10] 


A  CHILD  IN  THE  HOUSE 
predominant  processes  of  mental  change 
in  him — the  growth  of  an  almost  diseased 
sensibility  to  the  spectacle  of  suffering, 
and,  parallel  with  this,  the  rapid  growth 
of  a  certain  capacity  of  fascination  by 
})right  colour  and  choice  form — the  sweet 
curvings,  for  instance,  of  the  lips  of  those 
who  seemed  to  him  comely  persons,  modu- 
lated in  such  delicate  unison  to  what  they 
said  or  sang — marking  early  the  activity 
in  him  of  a  more  than  customary  sensu- 
ousness,  'the  lust  of  the  eye,'  as  the 
Preacher  says,  which  might  lead  him,  one 
day,  how  far!  Could  he  have  foreseen 
the  weariness  of  the  way!  In  music 
sometimes  the  two  sorts  of  impressions 
came  together,  and  he  would  weep,  to  the 
surprise  of  older  people." 

[11] 


WALTER  PATER 

We  know,  too,  that  there  came  one 
time  a  "cry  on  the  stair,"  telhng  of  a 
death  in  the  house.  We  may  well  believe 
that  he  was  never  precisely  a  vociferous 
boy,  and  remembering  how  much  of  his 
mature  writing  was  to  partake  of  the 
sombreness  of  meditatio  mortis,  we  may 
see  something  other  than  fiction  in  what 
he  tells  us  of  Florian  Deleal's  sympa- 
thetic but  quite  morbid  imaginings: 

"He  would  think  of  Julian,  fallen  into 
incurable  sickness,  as  spoiled  in  the  sweet 
blossom  of  his  skin  like  pale  amber  and 
his  honey-like  hair;  of  Cecil,  early  dead, 
as  cut  off  from  the  lilies,  from  golden 
summer  days,  from  women's  voices;  and 
what  comforted  him  a  little  was  the 
thought   of   the   turning   of   the   child's 

[12] 


A  CHILD  IN  THE  HOUSE 
flesh  to  violets  in  the  turf  above  him. 
And  thinking  of  the  very  poor,  it  was 
not  the  things  that  most  men  care  most 
for  that  he  yearned  to  give  them;  but 
fairer  roses,  perhaps,  and  power  to  taste 
quite  as  they  will,  at  their  ease  and  not 
task-burdened,  a  certain  desirable  clear 
light  in  the  new  morning,  through  which 
sometimes  he  had  noticed  them,  quite  un- 
conscious of  it,  on  the  way  to  their  early 
toil." 

Finally,  considering  the  location  of 
Enfield,  it  is  reasonable  to  suppose  that 
Walter  Pater,  as  well  as  Florian  Deleal, 
was  wrought  upon  by  the  mysterious  ur- 
banity of  the  adjacent  city;  and  remem- 
bering that  pontifical  play  one  must  be 
confident  that  he,  too,  "began  to  love,  for 

[13] 


WALTER  PATER 
their  own  sakes,  church  lights,  holy  days, 
all  that  belonged  to  the  comely  order  of 
the  sanctuary,  the  secrets  of  its  white 
linen,  and  holy  vessels,  and  fonts  of  pure 
water;"  and  that  for  him,  too,  "its  hie- 
ratic puritj''  and  simplicity  became  the 
type  of  something  he  desired  always  to 
have  about  him  in  actual  life." 

When  he  was  fourteen  Pater  was  sent 
away  from  his  home  to  King's  School  at 
Canterbmy.  He  appears  there  as  a  some- 
what slow  and  serious  boy,  not  caring 
for  boisterous  sports,  sometimes  thought 
an  idler,  or  perhaps  a  dreamer.  It  is 
the  consensus  of  opinion  among  Pater's 
friends  that  the  background  and  setting 
for  the  accoimt  of  Emerald  Uthwart's 
schooldays  is  this  Canterbury  Academe. 

[14] 


A  CHILD  IN  THE  HOUSE 
Here,  in  one  of  the  places  in  which  Eng- 
land has  "preferred  to  locate  the  some- 
what pensive  education  of  its  more  fa- 
voured youth,"  he  studied  his  classics.  As 
he  acquired  pagan  Latin  and  Greek  in  the 
very  shadow  of  medi^evalism,  there  may 
have  come  to  him  some  of  those  "delight- 
ful physiognomic  results"  which  he  after- 
ward noted  in  many  a  boyish  face.  At 
any  rate  it  must  have  been  at  this  time 
that  he  first  became  a  diligent  reader  of 
books.  There  are,  he  tells  us,  "in  every 
generation  of  schoolboys  ...  a  few 
who  find  out,  almost  for  themselves,  the 
beauty  and  power  of  good  literature,  even 
in  the  literature  they  must  read  perforce; 
and  this,  in  turn,  is  but  the  handsel  of  a 
beauty  and  power  still  active  in  the  actual 

[15] 


WALTER  PATER 
world,  should  they  have  the  good  fortune, 
or  rather  acquire  the  skill,  to  deal  with  it 
properly.  It  has  something  of  the  stir 
and  unction  —  this  intellectual  awaking 
with  a  leap — of  the  coming  of  love." 
With  Pater  as  with  Emerald  Uthwart, 
this  quickening  seems  to  have  taken  place 
when  he  was  in  his  seventeenth  year. 

Toward  the  end  of  his  schooldays  he 
came  much  under  the  influence  of  the 
polished  scholarship,  graceful  lyric  gift, 
and  winning  piety  of  Keble.  For  a  time 
hence,  it  is  said,  he  thought  of  ultimately 
taking  orders.  But  this  proved  to  be 
only  a  fervour  of  adolescence,  and  when, 
at  the  age  of  nineteen,  he  went  up  to 
Oxford,  the  bent  of  his  future  career  was 
still  undetermined. 

[16] 


II 

OXFORD 

In  June,  1858,  Pater  matriculated  at 
Oxford  as  a  commoner  of  Queen's  Col- 
lege, with  an  exhibition  from  Canterbury. 
Henceforth  his  life  ran  smoothly  in  the 
traditional  academic  channel  with  whicli 
English  literary  biography  has  familiarly 
acquainted  us.  Oxford,  "that  sweet  city 
with  her  dreanking  spires,"  was  to  be  his 
home  for  nearly  all  of  his  life.  It  is, 
perhaps,  just  to  imagine  that  in  his  very 
style  we  may  discover  sometliing  of  the 
spirit  of  her  mood  as  Matthew  Arnold 
found  another  trace  of  it  in  Newman's. 

It  has  always  been  the  right  and  natu- 
ral thing  for  the  undergraduate  of  sen- 
sibility to  come  under  the  spell  of  some 

[17] 


WALTER  PATER 

one  or  two  makers  of  the  "literaturt;  of 
power."  Walter  Pater,  being  before  all 
else  an  undergraduate  of  sensibility,  was 
not  slow  so  to  yield  himself.  By  1859 
he  had  become  devoted  to  Ruskin  and  to 
Goethe.  Their  influence  he  was,  perhaps, 
to  transcend,  certainly  to  fuse  with  many 
others,  but  never  wholly  to  belie  or  dis- 
own. 

Such  reading  as  this,  reinforced  by  his 
philosophical  studies,  led  him  to  the  way 
beaten  by  the  feet  of  many  generations 
of  reflective  youth.  Before  the  end  of 
his  undergraduate  days  he  seems,  again 
like  his  own  Florian  Deleal,  to  have  been 
much  occupied  with  "the  estimate  of  the 
proportion  of  the  sensuous  and  ideal  ele- 
ments in  human  knowledge,  the  relative 

[18] 


OXFORD 

parts  they  bear  in  it;  and,  in  his  intellec- 
tual scheme,  was  led  to  assign  very  little 
to  the  abstract  thought,  and  much  to  its 
sensible  vehicle  or  occasion."  Not  long 
after  this,  his  philosophical  and  sceptical 
tendency  finally  prevailed  over  his  half- 
formed  intention  of  becoming  a  Unita- 
rian clergyman — a  notion  that  had  oc- 
curred to  him  after  he  had  abandoned  the 
intention  of  entering  the  Establishment. 
Indeed,  he  had  already  begun,  consciously 
and  carefully,  to  acquire  technique  in  the 
art  which  was  to  be  his.  Though  none 
of  his  undergraduate  productions  has 
been  preserved,  we  hear  of  copious  verse 
translation  from  Goethe,  from  Alfred  de 
Musset,  and  from  that  fragrant  jardi- 
niere for  the  perfuming  of  a  young  gen- 

[19] 


WALTER  PATER 
tleman's  style,  the  "Greek  Anthology." 
A  little  later  there  was  a  time  when  for 
months  he  applied  himself  daily  to  the 
painstaking  translation  of  a  page  from 
the  prose  of  Sainte-Beuve,  or  Flaubert, 
eminent  humanists,  patient  artists  with 
the  file,  and  favoured  lovers  of  the  proper 
word.  The  effect  of  such  labour  as  this 
in  forming  his  finished  style  is  incal- 
culable. 

In  1862  Pater  graduated  B.A.  with  a 
second  class  in  classics.  As  he  had  been 
coached  by  Jowett  himself,  and  hoped  for 
a  first,  he  seems  always  to  have  regarded 
his  degree  as  something  of  a  disappoint- 
ment. For  two  years  he  was  a  private 
tutor;  in  1864  he  became  Fellow  of 
Brasenose,  and  then,  in  1865,  he  proceed- 

[20] 


OXFORD 
ed  M.A.  As  is  the  way  with  men  of  his 
character,  these  first  years  after  gradua- 
tion were  momentous  in  fixing  his  tem- 
perament and  in  determining  the  direc- 
tion of  his  hfe.  It  was  at  this  time  that 
he  became  a  member  of  an  essay  club 
suggestively  known  as  the  "Old  Mor- 
tality," and  the  intimate  friend  of  such 
men  as  T.  H.  Green,  Professor  Net- 
tleship,  Principal  Caird,  and  Mr.  Swin- 
burne. His  early  study  of  character, 
"Diaphaneite,"  published  posthumously, 
but  written  in  1864,  was  read  to  this 
circle  of  friends.  It  is  a  document  of 
very  curious  interest  to  the  student  of 
Pater's  mind.  It  shows  the  sensuous, 
subtilely  allusive,  somewhat  languorous 
flow  of  his  style  still  undeveloped.     The 

[211 


WALTER    PATER 

sentences  are  shorter,  more  uniformly  pe- 
riodic; and  the  whole  composition  moves 
with  unwonted  resiliency  and  speed.  But 
in  the  intimacy  of  the  study,  and  in  the 
comely,  Hellenic  type  of  character  held 
up  to  our  admiration,  there  is  a  clear  fore- 
shadowing of  Pater's  later  manner  and 
theme.  It  is,  moreover,  pervaded  by  the 
"wistfulness  of  mind,  the  feeling  that 
there  is  so  much  to  know,"  which  marks 
the  true  humanistic  temperament.  A 
year  later,  in  company  with  Mr.  Charles 
L.  Shadwell,  the  life-long  friend  who  was 
to  be  his  literary  executor.  Pater  visited 
Italy  for  the  first  time.  Here  he  applied 
himself  to  the  direct  and  diligent  study 
of  the  monuments  of  the  arts  of  antiquity 
and  of  the  Italian  Renaissance.    The  bent 

[22] 


OXFORD 

of  his  own  work  is  henceforth  determined. 
He  is  now  become  the  frank  and  thor- 
oughgoing "humanist." 

We  must  remember  that  by  1865  the 
Tractarian  Movement  had  spent  much  of 
its  force  as  the  inspiration  or  the  pertur- 
bation of  Oxford  Fellows.  To  a  young 
man  of  Pater's  stamp  two  courses  opened. 
He  might  give  himself  up  to  the  influ- 
ence of  men  like  Maurice  and  Martineau, 
endeavouring  so  to  escape  from  the  trend 
of  the  current  Darwinism,  or  he  might, 
with  certain  reservations,  accept  the  sci- 
entific doctrines  of  the  evolutionists,  ally 
himself  to  the  aesthetic  movement  begun 
by  Ruskin  and  the  pre-Raphaelite  broth- 
erhood, and  strive  by  close  and  sympa- 
thetic  study   of   the   humanities,    as   the 

[23] 


WALTER  PATER 
ground  for  the  humanisation  and  realisa- 
tion of  aesthetic  theory,  to  give  to  that 
movement  greater  consideration  and  a 
wider  acceptance.  The  cogency  of  tem- 
perament impelled  Pater  to  the  latter 
course.  In  1866  came  his  first  pubhca- 
tion,  a  fragment  on  Coleridge,  in  the 
Westminster  Review.  In  its  unrevised 
form  this  was  chiefly  concerned  with  cer- 
tain literary  aspects  of  Coleridge's  philo- 
sophic thought.  Then,  in  1867,  came  the 
great  essay  on  "Winckelmann,"  an  expo- 
sition of  Goethe's  so-called  naturalism 
and  a  defence  of  the  Hellenic  or  sesthet- 
ical  view  of  life.  A  year  later,  appreci- 
ating the  significance  of  the  recent  work 
of  William  Morris,  he  wrote  his  study  of 
"Esthetic  Poetry."     Thus   by   1869   he 

[24] 


OXFORD 

became  recognised  as  the  holder  and  de- 
fender of  a  definite  and  individual  posi- 
tion in  all  matters  artistic.  In  this  year, 
as  Mr.  Gosse  has  recorded,  he  began 
wearing,  with  his  frock-coat  and  top -hat, 
a  silk  tie  of  brilliant  apple-green  in  token 
that  he  was  "henceforth  no^onger  a  pro- 
vincial philosopher,  but  a  critic  linked  to 
London  and  the  modern  arts." 

From  1869  to  1886,  notwithstanding 
his  affiliation  with  metropolitan  criticism. 
Pater  continued  to  live  the  more  or  less 
cloistered  life  of  a  university  fellow. 
Soon  he  became  distinguished  as  one  of 
the  first  of  Oxford  dons  to  bring  a  care- 
fully studied  taste  to  the  arrangement 
and  decoration  of  his  rooms.  He  wished 
always  to  have  by  him  a  few  fine  and 

[25] 


WALTER  PATER 
beautiful  objects,  but  he  had  none  of  the 
instinct  of  the  virtuoso  or  collector;  so  it 
were  beautiful,  he  took  as  keen  a  pleasure 
in  the  skilful  copy  of  coin,  or  vase,  or 
picture,  as  in  the  priceless  original. 

Notwithstanding  his  temperamental 
shyness  and  reserve,  Walter  Pater  would 
seem  to  have  been  a  very  companionable 
person,  always,  as  he  would  say,  making 
the  most  of  the  "sympathetic  ties"  of  liu- 
man  life.  Gradually,  and  doubtless  al- 
most imperceptibly  to  himself,  he  became 
a  quietly  dominant  leader  of  the  intel- 
lectual life  of  the  university.  With  the 
Oxford  youth  he  was  popular,  and,  like 
many  another  bachelor  teacher,  he  seems 
to  have  given  to  his  favourite  boys  a  cer- 
tain wealth  of  idealised  sentiment,  which 

[26] 


OXFORD 

most  men  expend  otherwise.  As  has  been 
the  way  of  true  humanists,  always  and 
everywhere,  he  was  pecuHarly  sensitive 
to  the  spontaneities  of  young  Hfe,  with 
its  light  affections,  with  its  profounder 
hero-worships,  and,  above  all,  with  its 
unblurred  gracefulness  of  body.  In  his 
later  "Greek  Studies"  he  recurs  delight- 
fully to  the  visions  of  Hellenic  youth  he 
has  found  at  Thamesside,  and  to  the 
wandering  shade  of  pagan  melancholy  he 
has  seen  darkening  in  young  English 
eyes. 

Sometimes,  however,  as  happened  with 
Tennyson,  his  shyness  and  reserve  pro- 
duced an  effect  not  far  from  rudeness. 
His  friend  of  later  years,  Mr.  William 
Sharp,  relates: 

[27] 


WALTER    PATER 

"Often  I  have  seen  some  fellow-don 
wave  a  greeting  which  either  he  did  not 
see  or  pretended  not  to  see,  and  it  was 
rare  that  his  eyes  rested  on  any  under- 
graduate who  saluted  him  unless  the  eva- 
sion would  be  too  obviously  discourteous. 
On  the  other  hand,  he  would  now  and 
again  go  out  of  his  way  to  hail  and  speak 
cordially  to  some  young  fellow  in  whom 
he  felt  a  genuine  interest." 

In  a  memorial  sermon  preached  by  one 
of  Pater's  friends,  many  years  after  the 
time  of  which  I  am  writing,  there  is  an 
accovmt  of  his  academic  character  which 
may  properly  be  quoted  here,  to  correct 
the  current  impression  that  there  was 
too  much  of  Sybaritism  in  his  life: 

"Naturally  inclined  to  a  certain  rigour 

[28] 


OXFORD 

in  discipline,  he  was  full  of  excuse  for  in- 
dividual cases ;  and  regretted  and  thought 
over  stem  measures  more  than  most  mem- 
bers of  a  governing  body  can  afford  to 
do.  The  pains  he  took  about  his  frequent 
hospitality  was  a  sign  of  the  conscientious 
thoroughness  with  which  he  performed 
the  most  trivial  actions  of  life.  And  this 
explains  the  slowness  of  his  composition 
and  the  classical  smallness  of  the  bulk  of 
his  writings. 

"To  a  certain  extent,  but  to  a  certain 
extent  only,  these  may  be  taken  as  an 
index  to  his  character,  as  unveiling  the 
true  man.  But  to  those  who  knew  him  as 
he  lived  among  us  here,  they  seemed  a 
sort  of  disguise.  There  was  the  same  ten- 
derness,   the    same   tranquillising    repose 

[291 


WALTER  PATER 
about  his  conversation  that  we  find  in  his 
writings,  the  same  carefuhiess  in  trifles 
and  exactness  of  expression.  But  his 
written  works  betray  little  trace  of  that 
childlike  simplicity,  that  naive  joyous- 
ness,  that  never-wearying  pleasure  in 
animals  and  their  ways,  that  grave  yet 
half -amused  seriousness,  also  childlike,  in 
which  he  met  the  events  of  the  daily 
routine.  His  habits  were  precise  and 
austere,  in  some  respects  simple  to  the 
last  degree — as  unlike  the  current  and 
erroneous  impression  (which  certain  pas- 
sages of  his  books  may  leave)  as  it  is  pos- 
sible to  conceive;  almost  the  sole  luxury 
he  allowed  himself  was  a  bowl  of  rose- 
leaves,  preserved  by  an  old  lady  in  the 
country  from  a  special  receipt,  and  every 

[30] 


OXFORD 
year  as  a  present  to  him,  as  a  reminder  of 
her  friendship.  He  did  not  accumulate 
around  him  an  increasing  number  of  un- 
necessary props  of  Hfe,  as  so  many  men 
of  sedentary  life  are  unhappily  tempted 
to  do.  He  never  smoked,  rarely  took 
tonic  or  medicine  of  any  kind,  and  has 
left  an  example  which  it  would  be  well  if 
every  student  could  follow,  spending  his 
morning  in  writing  or  lecturing,  some 
part  of  the  afternoon  in  correcting  the 
composition  of  the  noon,  and  in  the  even- 
ing closing  up  his  books  entirely — re- 
garding it  as  folly  to  attempt  to  make 
up  for  idleness  in  the  day  by  unseason- 
able labour  at  a  time  when  reading  men 
are  best  in  bed." 

In  the  summer  throughout  his  residence 

[31] 


WALTER  PATER 
at  Oxford  Pater  sought  relief  from  his 
lecturing  in  tours  afoot  upon  the  Conti- 
nent. Indeed,  ranging  pedestrianism  was 
always  his  chosen  diversion;  and  one  is  a 
little  surprised  to  learn  that  he  sometimes 
indulged  in  it  to  excess,  often  suffering 
therefrom  weariness  and  exhaustion.  It 
is  characteristic  of  his  reserved  and  sta- 
tionary temperament  that,  fond  as  he  was 
of  Continental  wanderings,  and  in  spite 
of  his  excellent  literary  scholarship  in 
German  and  the  Romance  languages, 
he  could  speak  with  ease  no  tongue  save 
his  o\vn. 

The  most  important  business  of  the  ten 
years  of  Pater's  life  between  1870  and 
1880  was  the  slow  and  loving  composition 
of  most  of  his  best  critical  essays.     In 

[32] 


OXFORD 

1873  appeared  his  first  book — indeed  the 
only  one  before  "Marius"  in  1885;  this 
was  the  volume  entitled  "The  Renais- 
sance: Studies  in  Art  and  Poetry."  In 
the  eight  essays  which  it  contained — five 
reprinted  from  the  magazines,  and  three 
new — together  with  the  Preface  and  Con- 
clusion, Pater  contrived  to  present  a  sum- 
mary of  the  humanistic  tendencies  of  the 
Renaissance,  and  with  it  some  special 
pleading  for  his  own  so-called  Cyrenaic 
philosophy  of  life.  This  volume,  which 
has  proved  the  most  popular  of  his  works, 
has  already  appeared  in  eight  editions,  no 
mean  record  for  a  book  of  its  class.  To- 
gether with  "Marius,"  the  more  ardent 
Paterians  have  usually  esteemed  it  their 
most  canonical  Scripture. 

[33] 


WALTER  PATER 
It  was  this  volume  that  won  Pater  the 
distinction  of  being  satirised  in  the  excel- 
lent company  of  Jowett,  Arnold,  Ruskin, 
and  Huxley.  In  1877  "The  New  Re- 
pubHc"  appeared  anonymously,  to  be 
fathered  not  long"  after  upon  Mr.  W.  H. 
Mallock.  The  scheme  of  the  book  is 
rather  clever.  There  is  a  Saturday-to- 
Monday  party  at  an  English  country 
house.  The  persons  who  have  been  gath- 
ered dispute  freely  of  faith,  culture,  phil- 
osophy, and  life,  and  the  inconclusiveness 
of  the  debate  is  made  to  burlesque  the  fu- 
tility of  various  contemporary  intellectual 
movements.  Pater  is  represented  by  Mr. 
Rose,  a  "pre-Raphaelite"  with  a  very  pale 
face  and  very  heavy  moustache.     In  the 

[34] 


OXFORD 

first  volume  he  is  a  rather  silentious  per- 
son who  spends  most  of  his  time  looking 
out  of  the  window  at  sunsets,  or  helping 
at  his  tasks  a  rosy-cheeked  boy  with  fair 
golden  hair.  But  in  the  second  volume 
he  takes  advantage  of  a  psychological 
moment  to  soliloquise  dreamily,  some- 
what to  the  weariness  of  the  company, 
concerning  the  lesson  of  the  art  of  the 
Renaissance,  the  glorification  of  sensa- 
tion. His  talk  is  a  skilful  cento  of 
phrases  deftly  conveyed  from  Pater's 
"Conclusion"  to  The  Renaissance,  and  his 
characteristic  diction,  cadence,  and  allu- 
siveness  are  parodied  with  considerable 
felicity.  His  so-called  "paganishi"  is  also 
introduced,  and  the  well-meaning  but  un- 

[35] 


WALTER  PATER 

inspired  Lady  Ambrose  is  made  to  ex- 
claim, upon  the  titillation  of  her  lady-like 
sensibility:  "What  an  odd  man  Mr.  Rose 
is !  He  always  seems  to  talk  of  everybody 
as  if  they  had  no  clothes  on."  The  satire, 
as  a  whole,  is  not  always  pleasant,  and 
often  it  is  mijust;  but  it  serves  to  show 
the  way  in  which  Pater  has  been  taken 
by  many  people,  perverse  indeed,  yet  not 
without  some  show  of  sanity  to  their 
credit. 

After  the  publication  of  the  "Renais- 
sance" Pater  continued  his  care-taking 
composition  at  the  average  rate  of  two 
studies  each  year.  By  1881  the  majority 
of  his  essays  in  art  and  letters  had  been 
written  and  printed  in  the  magazines. 
The  bulk  of  his  work  done  after  that  year 

[36] 


OXFORD 

is  comprised  in  "Marius,"  "Plato  and 
Platonism,"  "Imaginary  Portraits,"  and 
other  imaginative  or  philosophic  studies 
resembling  them. 


[37] 


Ill 

CRITICISM    OF    ART    AND    LETTERS 

One  sometimes  thinks  that  the  nine- 
teenth century  was  never  completely 
cured  of  that  world-malady  of  its  middle 
age  which  became  chronic  from  the  first 
romantic  green-sickness  of  its  youth. 
Among  the  obscurer  and  less  remarked 
symptoms  of  this  disease  was  its  easy 
catholicity  of  taste,  its  lack  of  normal 
narrowness  in  literary  matters.  There 
was  something  virile,  in  spite  of  limita- 
tions, in  an  age  which  could  say  with 
Pepys  that  "A  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream"  was  "the  foohshest  play"  that 
ever  it  saw.  In  the  surcease  of  bitter, 
bookish  dislikes  and  complacent  deprecia- 

[38] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
tions,  in  the  easy  geniality  of  its  literary 
judgments  the  nineteenth  in  its  maturity 
was  the  Hamlet  of  the  centuries.  Of  this 
affable,  retrospective  turn  in  the  mind  of 
his  age  Walter  Pater  is  an  excellent  ex- 
ample. One  of  the  first  impressions  which 
the  considerate  reader  derives  from  his 
criticism  is  that  of  the  absence  from  it  of 
the  note  of  personal  antipathy;  and  this 
is  likely  to  be  coupled  with  a  perception 
of  the  wide  area  of  bookland  which  it 
drains. 

Pater  was  a  man  of  adventurous  men- 
tal temperament,  and  in  those  long, 
leisurely  years  at  Oxford  he  voyaged 
through  strange,  and  sometimes  perilous, 
seas  of  thought.  He  read  voluminously; 
and  preserved  from  his  reading,  by  the 

[39] 


WALTER    PATER 

aid  of  innumerable  little  squares  of  paper, 
immense  stores  of  impressions  and  ideas. 
The  reader  of  his  essays  will  find  therein 
not  only  a  sympathetic,  but  even  a  re- 
spectably exact,  knowledge  of  enough 
departments  of  scholarship  to  provide  a 
decent  outfit  of  mental  furniture  for 
some  half-dozen  academic  specialists.  He 
knew  his  English,  Continental,  Latin, 
and  Greek  literature  as  a  scholar  knows 
them;  of  philosophy,  both  ancient  and 
modern,  he  possessed  a  knowledge  more 
than  usually  close,  and  much  more  than 
usually  realising;  and  in  art  he  was  a 
connoisseur.  He  devoted  his  life  to  the 
pursuit  of  that  "comparative  literature," 
or  Culturgeschichte,  which  has  been  one 
of  the  late  developments  of  the  Baconian 

[40] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
organisation  of  learning.  But  he  brought 
to  his  study  none  of  the  a  priori  prepos- 
sessions, HegcHan,  Darwinian,  or  what 
not,  which  so  many  scholars  have  lugged 
into  this  field.  Rather  he  approached  his- 
tory, philosophy,  literature,  art  in  the 
temper  of  the  old,  all-embracing  human- 
ism, striving  to  put  flesh  on  old  bones,  to 
give  to  ancient  lives  a  vivid  personal 
realisation,  so  as  to  fulfil  his  own.  Hence 
it  came  about  that,  while  his  work  is 
in  a  sense  bookish,  it  was,  nevertheless, 
strangely  vital  and  close  to  the  trend  of 
the  general  life.  He  undertook  the 
"compellation,"  as  old  writers  say,  of  the 
experience  of  the  Western  World.  He 
held  as  the  essence  of  his  humanism  the 
belief  that  "nothing  which  has  ever  inter- 

[41] 


WALTER    PATER 

ested  living  men  and  women  can  wholly 
lose  its  vitality;  no  language  they  have 
spoken,  no  oracle  beside  which  they  have 
hushed  their  voices,  no  dream  which  has 
once  been  entertained  by  actual  human 
minds,  nothing  about  which  they  have 
been  passionate  or  expended  time  and 
zeal."  So  holding  fast  this  old  doctrine 
of  nihil  humani  alienum,  he  strove  by 
retrospective  generalisation  upon  the  past 
life  of  the  world  not  to  minimise  the 
actual  details  of  personal  life,  but  to 
enrich  them  with  the  significance  of  the 
whole;  not  to  disown  the  present,  but  to 
chasten  to-day  by  the  solemn  procession 
of  yesterdays.  It  is  hard  to  see  what 
worthier  end  scholarship  could  propose  to 
herself. 

[42] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
Although  Pater  carried  to  his  multi- 
farious studies  no  rigid  metaphysical  no- 
tions, he  was  not  slow  to  formulate,  and 
to  express  in  the  "Renaissance,"  certain 
clear  opinions  upon  the  method  of  aes- 
thetics and  the  function  of  art.  Some 
consideration  of  these  must  precede  any 
attention  to  the  details  of  his  literary  and 
artistic  criticism. 

The  man  who  had  such  care  for  things 
tangible  and  visible,  who,  like  Montaigne, 
had  come  to  esteem  the  more  doctrinaire 
philosophy  of  his  day  notliing  better  than 
poetry  sophisticated,  will  have  none  of 
any  aesthetic  theory  which  may  tend  to  fix 
too  stolidly  the  shy  spirit  of  beauty.  He 
will  admit  to  his  court,  with  their  testhetic 
formulse  and  theoretic  distinctions,  Kant 

[43] 


WALTER  PATER 
and  Hegel  and  Schiller  and  Cousin  and 
Ruskin;  but  he  will  not  suffer  them  to 
enshroud,  with  any  stiff,  academic  dra- 
pery of  definition,  the  pure  line  and 
bright  colour  of  the  beauty  he  would  con- 
template. 

"Beauty,"  he  tells  us,  "like  all  other 
qualities  presented  to  human  experience, 
is  relative;  and  the  definition  of  it  be- 
comes unmeaning  and  useless  in  propor- 
tion to  its  abstractness.  To  define  beauty, 
not  in  the  most  abstract,  but  in  the  most 
concrete  terms  possible,  to  find  not  a  uni- 
versal formula  for  it,  but  the  formula 
which  expresses  most  adequately  this  or 
that  special  manifestation  of  it,  is  the  aim 
of  the  true  student  of  aesthetics." 

While  .this  forbids  him  to  discuss  ulti- 

[  44  ] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
mate  metaphysical  theories  of  beauty,  it 
is  no  bar  to  reflection  upon  the  nature 
and  function  of  art;  and  it  was  in  this 
field  that  Pater  deployed  as  an  aesthetic 
philosopher.  When  liis  theorising  is  re- 
duced to  its  simplest  terms  it  may  be 
stated  in  brief  compass.  Art,  he  held,  is 
the  expression  of  the  beauty  which  is 
found  in  the  world  by  the  imaginative 
vision;  its  purpose  is  the  enrichment  of 
life. 

The  Ruskinian  theory,  as  sometimes 
interpreted,  that  art  is  a  kind  of  serving- 
maid  to  piety,  was  odious  to  him.  But 
while  he  contends  that  the  business  of  art 
is  simply  to  afford  us  intense  and  noble 
pleasure,  later  in  "Marius"  he  expressly 
affirms  that,  at  its  highest,  this  pleasure 

[45] 


WALTER    PATER 
cannot  fail  to  furnish  an  ethical  motive 
and  impulse. 

Within  these  broad  outlines  he  compre- 
hended many  refinements  of  aesthetic  the- 
ory. Of  these  the  one  usually  thought 
most  characteristic  of  Pater,  agamst 
which  the  embattled  hosts  of  criticism 
have  advanced,  is  the  notion  stated  most 
clearly  in  "The  School  of  Giorgione," 
that  the  norm  of  art,  the  limiting  form 
toward  which  all  good  art  constantly 
tends,  is  music;  that  lyrical  poetry,  by 
reason  of  its  musicalness,  is  the  highest 
form  of  hterature;  that  the  other  arts  are 
but  other  kinds  of  musical  harmony ;  that 
architecture,  even,  is  but  music  petrified, 
a  harmony  in  stone.  It  must  be  con- 
fessed that  even  in  "The  Renaissance" 

[46] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
Pater  does  not  keep  quite  consistently  to 
his  theory.  At  times  he  seems,  like  Poe 
or  Baudelaire,  to  choose  music  as  his  typi- 
cal art  because  of  its  fluidity  or  ethereal- 
ity, its  way  of  weaving  mystical  spells 
about  our  mood,  its  power  of  catching 
directly  at  emotion,  and  of  reproducing 
it  with  the  slightest  mediation  of  material 
symbols  and  with  the  least  demand  for  in- 
tellectual interpretation.  At  other  times 
he  shifts  his  point  of  view  until  it  is  the 
sensuousness  of  music  that  we  see  most 
clearly.  Again  music  will  be  used  in  a 
Platonic  sense  in  Avhich  the  intellectual 
element  of  harmony  is  preponderant. 
Here  it  is  the  ordered  symphonies  of  art 
he  is  thinking  of;  their  usefulness  in  the 
precipitation  of  cloudy  moods,   or  as  a 

[47] 


WALTER  PATER 
homoeopathic  cure  for  morbid  enthusiasm. 
But  as  a  strict  and,  as  it  were,  logarhyth- 
mic  structure  is  equally  necessary  to  all 
arts,  he  is  led  sometimes  to  a  kind  of 
classical  and  Aristotelian  aesthetic,  with  a 
severe  insistence  upon  "structure,"  into 
which  few  other  expounders  of  the  "musi- 
cal" theory  of  art  would  care  to  follow 
him.  This  theory  is  nowhere  presented 
systematically,  and  in  the  context  where 
the  fragments  of  it  occur  they  are  usually 
unimpeachable;  j^et  the  drift  of  it  all  has 
proved  hable  to  misconception.  It  is  a 
delicate  affair  to  hold  that  because  music 
is  the  most  purely  and  directly  suggestive 
of  the  arts,  it  is,  therefore,  the  most  "spir- 
itual." One  cannot  maintain  this  unless 
he  is  also  prepared  to  hold  that  clear  ideas 

[48] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
in  themselves  are  less  "of  the  sj^irit"  than 
undefined  emotions,  and  become  spiritual- 
ised as  they  grow  vague.  This  conten- 
tion, which  is  so  dear  to  the  happy  hearts 
of  some  of  our  modern  mystics,  is,  when 
stated  in  this  form,  clearly  rubbish. 

But  by  such  perennial,  metaphysical 
pothers  as  this  Pater  was  not  greatly  dis- 
turbed. All  he  sought  was  some  formula 
for  an  art  which  should  express,  as  he  at 
that  time  conceived  Goethe's  to  express 
it,  the  objective  variety  of  modern  life,  its 
subtile  and  complex  inwardness.  In  the 
essay  on  Winckelmann  he  puts  the  case 
thus: 

"For  us  necessity  is  not,  as  of  old,  a 
sort  of  mythological  personage  without 
us,  with  whom  we  can  do  warfare;  it  is  a 

[49] 


WALTER  PATER 
magic  web  woven  through  and  through 
us,  hke  that  magnetic  system  of  which 
modern  science  speaks,  penetrating  us 
with  a  network  subtiler  than  our  subtilest 
nerves,  yet  bearing  in  it  the  central  forces 
of  the  world.  Can  art  express  this  with 
Hellenic  blitheness  and  originality?"* 

This  was  the  question  which  Pater  set 
himself  to  answer  step  by  step,  in  his 
specific  criticisms  of  painters,  prosemen, 
and  poets.  It  is  in  the  actual  application, 
in  his  intimately  sympathetic  approach,  in 
his  untiring  care  of  analysis  that  this 
point  of  view  became  effective  in  criticism. 

*  The  pervasiveness  of  such  thought  is  strikingly  illus- 
trated in  that  formula  of  the  '■'■  nouveUe  humauUsme"  for 
which  M.  Gregh  stands  in  France  :  Nous  devons  i miter  les 
Orecs,  nos  maitres,  en  faisant  qa  quails  feraient,  s'ils  ressus- 
citaient  jjarmi  nous. 

[50] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
Pater's  art  criticism  was  never  exclu- 
sively concerned  either  with  the  material 
or  with  the  ideal  aspects  of  art.  It 
was  the  misty  mid-region  of  "expressive- 
ness" that  he  took  for  his  peculiar  prov- 
ince. With  his  respect  for  the  bodily  eye 
he  was  always — in  specific  criticism  as  in 
the  general  theory — peculiarly  sensitive 
to  the  purely  sensuous  beauty  of  line  and 
colour  in  painting,  curve  in  sculpture,  light 
and  shade  in  architecture,  and  even  to  the 
prettiness  or  bizarre  quaintness  of  articles 
of  so-called  "virtue."  He  cared  more  than 
most  critics  for  chryselephantine  richness, 
for  the  luxury  of  ivory  and  gold;  and  in 
insisting  upon  this  liking,  especially  in  the 
later  "Greek  Studies,"  he  did  good  service 
in    balancing   the    abstracting   tendency, 

[51] 


WALTER  PATER 

which,  since  Lessing,  had  tended  to  over- 
refine  most  judgments  passed  upon  art. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  he  never  went  so 
far  in  this  direction  as  to  flatter  mere 
purse-proud  vertuosity.  He  never  lost 
sight  of  the  world  of  truth  under  that 
overworked  formula,  "the  typical  signifi- 
cance of  pure  form."  Not  Michelangelo, 
not  Walt  Whitman  even,  could  have 
realised  more  fuUv  the  supremacy  in  the 
imaginative  world  of  the  undraped  male 
figure. 

The  most  characteristic  and  stimulat- 
ing trait  in  Pater's  art  criticism  is  his 
ability  to  take  any  given  work  of  art  and 
express  from  it,  and  elaborate,  all  those 
vivid,  human  intimations,  vague  half- 
reminiscences,  or  visionary,  historic  adum- 

[52] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
brations  which  with  most  of  us  form  the 
ground  of  our  deepest  pleasures.,  but 
which,  in  most  cases,  can  never  become 
articulate.  He  does  not  do  this,  as  some 
have  done  it,  by  a  single  act  of  the  inter- 
pretative imagination  disclosing  the  ob- 
ject and  its  relations  for  us  as  if  in  a 
sudden  gleam  of  white  light.  Rather,  he 
studies  history,  biography,  letters,  frag- 
mentary remains,  all  the  flotsam  and  jet- 
sam of  the  past,  and  revives  the  atmos- 
phere, or — to  use  a  word  savouring  of  the 
shop — the  milieu  of  the  artist;  then  he 
subjects  the  painter's  work  to  a  kind  of 
long,  mystic  meditation,  until  by  virtue 
of  his  mediumship  we  behold  the  very 
spirit  of  it,  and  even  partake  of  the 
mood  wherein  it  was  created.     He  chose 

[53] 


WALTER    PATER 

by  preference  the  work  of  fluid,  ro- 
mantic periods  of  transition  foreshadow- 
ing the  complexity  of  his  own  time — the 
"anxious  and  wistful"  ages  of  Greece, 
Hellenizing  Rome,  Renaissance  Italy, 
Italianate  France  and  England,  Galliciz- 
ing Germany.  In  so  doing  he  often  in- 
curred the  risk  of  reading  himself  into  his 
subject.  But  actual  transgression  in  this 
respect  is  the  exception,  not  the  rule.  The 
recognition  of  the  truth  of  most  of  his  in- 
terpretations, even  the  more  subtile,  comes 
with  instantaneous  conviction  to  the  mind 
of  the  judicious  and  attentive  reader. 

In  all  his  work  of  this  sort  one  para- 
graph, in  its  mellow  and  musical  cadence, 
in  its  close  and  adroit  felicity  of  charac- 
terisation, and  in  its  charm  of  historic 

[54] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
suggestiveness,  is  quite  peerless.  It  has 
been  quoted  in  season  and  out;  often  it 
has  evoked  the  fooHsh  face  of  praise,  yet 
no  study  of  Pater  could  portray  his  tem- 
perament, or  convey  the  peculiar  quahty 
of  his  work  at  its  perfection,  which  failed 
to  recall  to  the  reader  the  incomparable 
passage  on  Leonardo  Da  Vinci's  La 
Gioconda: 

"The  presence  that  thus  rose  so  strange- 
ly beside  the  waters  is  expressive  of  what 
in  the  ways  of  a  thousand  years  men  had 
come  to  desire.  Hers  is  the  head  upon 
which  all  the  ends  of  the  world  are  come 
and  the  eyelids  are  a  little  weary.  It  is 
a  beauty  wrought  out  from  within  upon 
the  flesh,  the  deposit,  little  cell  by  cell,  of 
strange  thoughts   and   fantastic  reveries 

[55] 


WALTER  PATER 

and  exquisite  passions.  Set  it  for  a  mo- 
ment beside  one  of  those  white  Greek 
goddesses  or  beautiful  women  of  antiq- 
uity, and  how  would  they  be  troubled  by 
this  beauty,  into  which  the  soul  with  all 
its  maladies  has  passed !  All  the  thoughts 
and  experience  of  the  world  have  etched 
and  moulded  there,  in  that  which  they 
have  of  power  to  refine  and  make  expres- 
sive the  outward  form,  the  animalism  of 
Greece,  the  lust  of  Rome,  the  reverie  of 
the  middle  age  with  its  spiritual  ambition 
and  imaginative  loves,  the  return  of  the 
Pagan  world,  the  sins  of  the  Borgias. 
She  is  older  than  the  rocks  among  which 
she  sits;  like  the  vampire  she  has  been 
dead  many  times,  and  learned  the  secrets 
of  the  grave ;  and  has  been  a  diver  in  deep 

[56] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
seas  and  keeps  their  fallen  day  about  her; 
and  trafficked  for  strange  webs  with  East- 
ern merchants;  and,  as  Leda,  was  the 
mother  of  Helen  of  Troy,  and,  as  Saint 
Anne,  the  mother  of  JMary;  and  all  this 
has  been  to  her  but  as  the  sound  of  lyres 
and  flutes,  and  lives  only  in  the  delicacy 
with  which  it  has  moulded  the  changing 
lineaments,  and  tinged  the  eyelids  and  the 
hands.  The  fancy  of  a  perpetual  life, 
sweeping  together  ten  thousand  experi- 
ences, is  an  old  one;  and  modern  thought 
has  conceived  the  idea  of  humanity  as 
wrought  upon  by  and  summing  up  in 
itself  all  modes  of  thought  and  life.  Cer- 
tainly Lady  Lisa  might  stand  as  the  em- 
bodiment of  the  old  fancy,  the  symbol  of 
the  modern  idea." 

[57] 


WALTER  PATER 
The  imaginative  interpretation  of  the 
"sentiment"  of  pictorial  and  plastic  art 
can  go  no  further  safety.  This  is  the 
supreme  example  of  Pater's  characteris- 
tic elaboration  of  "expressiveness." 

It  is  fairly  accurate  to  affirm  that 
Pater's  literary  criticism  was  in  the  tra- 
dition which  found  its  typical  expression 
in  the  "Causeries  de  Lmidi."  Sainte- 
Beuve's  affair  was,  in  the  best  sense, 
atmospheric  criticism,  the  criticism  of 
knowledge,  of  the  true  connoisseur.  He 
was  a  myriad-minded  himianist,  all  things 
to  all  men,  yet  a  historian  withal,  a  psj'^- 
chologist,  and  a  trained  codifier  of  tem- 
peraments. Thus  two  diverse  schools  of 
criticism  have  acclaimed  him  master.    The 

[58] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
impressionistic  dilettante  finds  in  the  per- 
sonal tone  of  Sainte-Beuve's  work  war- 
rant for  the  display  of  his  own  fancies; 
while  the  severer  academic  critic  finds 
therein  inspiration  to  painstaking  study 
and  analysis,  or  even  to  operose  compila- 
tion. But,  irrespective  of  such  distinc- 
tions and  of  the  abuse  of  his  method, 
Sainte-Beuve  still  stands  as  the  teacher  of 
much  that  is  most  humane,  genial,  and 
wise  in  the  criticism  of  our  time.  His 
work  is  the  enduring  answer  to  the  slur- 
ring charges  which  the  ceaseless  flow  of 
literary  tittle-tattle  and  rhodomontade  has 
drawn  down  upon  all  critical  writing. 

Pater  was  an  early  student  of  Sainte- 
Beuve,  and,  as  the  sort  of  criticism  he 
found  in  his  pages  was  in  harmony  with 

[59] 


WALTER  PATER 

his  own  temperament  and  scholarly  hori- 
zon, he  did  not  delay  to  adoj^t  much  of  his 
method.  But  in  one  respect  Pater's  crit- 
ical writing  was  as  much  in  the  best  Eng- 
lish traditions  of  Coleridge  and  Lamb 
and  Hazlitt — of  good  criticism  every- 
where— as  in  the  mould  of  Sainte-Beuve. 
He  had  a  mind  capable  of  being  directly 
and  deeply  moved  by  the  presence  of 
beauty  in  a  piece  of  literature,  and  pecu- 
liarly responsive  to  the  distinctive  element 
of  personality  in  it.  He  took  the  pains 
first  of  all  to  realise  and  discriminate  his 
own  impressions.  Hence  he  was,  togeth- 
er with  the  earlier  romantic  critics,  among 
the  most  proficient  masters  of  the  art  of 
literary  interpretation,  as  he  himself  ex- 
pounds it: 

[60] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
"The  function  of  the  aesthetic  critic  is 
to  distinguish,  analyse,  and  separate  from 
its  adjuncts  the  virtue  by  which  a  picture, 
a  landscape,  a  fair  personality  in  life  or  in 
a  book  produces  the  special  impression  of 
beauty  or  pleasure,  to  indicate  what  the 
source  of  the  impression  is  and  under 
what  conditions  it  is  experienced." 

As  all  Pater's  criticism  is  essentially 
of  one  piece,  and  in  a  special  sense  the 
criticism  of  personality  in  literature,  it 
may  be  suggestive  to  marshal,  mediseval- 
wise,  all  the  worthies  of  whom  he  has 
extended  appreciations,  either  complete 
in  themselves  or  subsidiary  to  some  other 
study.  They  come  thronging,  we  may 
imagine,    a    goodly    company,    infinitely 

various,  but  not  uncongenial. 

[61] 


WALTER   PATER 

As  befits  his  dignity,  the  procession 
may  be  headed  by  the  Emperor  Marcus 
Aurehus  placidly  engaged  in  Stoic  medi- 
tation, closely  followed  by  Zeno  and 
Pythagoras.  Near  by,  Apuleius,  Lucian, 
and  Montaigne  chat  amiably  and  wisely, 
interrupted  now  and  again  by  some  stut- 
tered, lambent  witticism  from  Elia,  who, 
nevertheless,  shows  quite  as  much  predi- 
lection for  the  more  solemn  company  of 
Em'ipides  and  Sir  Thomas  Browne. 
Socrates  comes  genially,  surrounded  by 
questioning  youths ;  and  Plato,  with  Gior- 
dano Bruno,  and  Count  Pico  of  Miran- 
dola  hanging  upon  his  words,  discourses 
musically  as  Apollo's  lute.  In  the  inter- 
vals of  his  speech  Coleridge  takes  up  the 
thread  not  unacceptably,  though  he  de- 

[62] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
sists  at  times  to  discuss  such  more  sub- 
lunary matters  as  poetic  diction  with 
Ronsard,  Du  Bellay,  and  Wordsworth. 
Shakespeare,  ^lichelangelo,  and  Goethe 
come  together  in  somewhat  Olympian 
state.  Yet  none  is  more  keenly  alive  to 
all  that  passes  in  the  company;  Shake- 
speare, we  may  fancy,  passing  many  a  sig- 
nificant comment  with  Browning,  Goethe 
never  losing  sight  of  Winckelmann,  and 
Michelangelo  often  looking  reverently 
toward  Dante,  who  walks  sombrely  apart. 
Rossetti  and  William  Morris,  Octave 
Feuillet  and  Prosper  Merimee  sort  much 
by  themselves.  Last  of  tlie  line  come 
Pascal  and  Amiel,  holding  great  argu- 
ment of  faith  and  doubt;  careless  of  the 
pace,  or,  perhaps,  imable  to  hold  it,  they 

[63] 


WALTER  PATER 
have  lagged  far  behind.  All  about  are 
figures  and  faces  equally  real,  yet  whose 
names  are  not  in  the  histories:  Denys 
L'Auxerrois,  Sebastian  Van  Storck, 
Gaston  de  Latour,  Marius  the  Epicu- 
rean. 

Fantastic  as  it  may  seem,  some  such 
Chaucerian  gathering  as  this  best  conveys 
the  final  impression  of  Walter  Pater's 
criticism.  But  to  make  the  roll  complete- 
ly comprehensive  we  should  have  to  in- 
clude many  men — Blake,  for  instance,  of 
whom  there  are  no  formal  appreciations, 
yet  to  whom  there  are  so  many  Imninous 
passing  allusions  that  exhaustive  interpre- 
tations of  their  writing  might  almost  be 
pieced  together.  In  all  Pater's  work,  on 
the  other  hand,  certain  English  writers 

[64] 


CRITICISM    OF    ART    AND    LETTERS 
are,  as  the  ancient  and  useful  Hibernian- 
ism  goes,   conspicuous  by  their  absence, 
even  as  the  ground  for  a  stray  alhision. 
Some  of  these — Shelley,   for  example — 
might  perhaps  have  received  a  formal  ap- 
preciation by  Pater  had  longer  life  been 
granted  him.    Others,  like  Swift  or  John- 
son, the  types  of  somewhat  portly  virility 
in  our  literature,  seem  avoided  by  deliber- 
ate choice.     For  all  the  earlier  and  cruder 
periods   of  literature,   unless   powerfully 
informed    by    some    aspiring    romantic 
spirit,  his  sympathy,  in  spite  of  his  hu- 
manism, was  limited.    He  has  little  to  say 
of  the  ninth  century  or  of  the  fourteenth. 
But  this  is  not  to  be  charged  against  him 
as    unfortunate    limitation.      Even    the 
myriad-minded  humanist  cannot  concern 

[65] 


WALTER    PATER 
himself  with  everything,  and,  even  in  crit- 
icism, elective  affinities  have  their  use. 

As  in  Pater's  criticism  of  art,  so  in  that 
of  literature  the  chief  charm  is  the  en- 
gaging intimacy  of  understanding.  He 
wrote,  to  adapt  Wordsworth's  phrase, 
"with  his  eye  on  the  document."  In  his 
diligent,  cosmopolitan  reading  he  pre- 
served upon  his  little  squares  of  paper  the 
flashes  of  interpretative  intuition  and 
sympathy  which  come  swarmingly  but 
evanescently  to  the  ripe  and  responsive 
reader.  But  these  were  never  fitted  to- 
gether hastily  or  at  haphazard.  He  never 
made  a  crazj'^-quilt  of  his  notes.  Nor  did 
he  ever  attempt,  as  some  have  done,  to  dis- 
embowel his  theme — to  tear  the  heart  out 
of  it.    It  seems  to  have  been  his  way,  when 

[66] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
this  harvest  of  notes  was  duly  garnered, 
to  brood  over  his  subject  in  a  long,  ana- 
lytical scrutiny,  until,  with  a  clear  and 
complete  vision  of  the  whole  in  his  mind, 
each  piece  of  suggestive  detail  would  fall 
into  its  rightful  place  and  relation.  This 
formative  process  was  aided  by — as  it  cul- 
minated in — a  rare  power  of  literary  gen- 
eralisation. Who  but  he,  for  example, 
could  have  written  those  parallel  studies 
of  Greek  art  and  religion,  "Demeter" 
and  "Dionysus"?  What  other  among 
contemporary  critics  could  have  traced  the 
slow  evolution  of  an  ancient  popular 
mythos  so  cunningly  and  subtilely,  with 
such  a  convincing  embodiment  of  stray 
hints  of  meaning,  and  such  a  full  imagi- 
native realisation  of  old-world  dream. 

[67] 


WALTER  PATER 

It  was  by  virtue  of  the  same  method 
strictly  followed  through  all  its  stages 
that  he  produced  his  memorable  literary 
judgments.  It  was  thus  that  he  contrived 
such  satisfactory  critical  essays  as  that 
which  displays  Shakespeare's  English 
kings  as  protagonists  of  the  irony  of 
kingship,  types  of  average  human  nature 
flung  with  wonderfully  dramatic  effect 
into  the  vortex  of  great  events;  or  that 
which  portrays  Sir  Thomas  Browne  as 
the  supreme  expression  of  the  sombre, 
thaumaturgic,  atrabilious,  yet  loquacious 
mood  of  his  century ;  or  those  which  bring 
us  to  know  Pico  Mirandola  with  his 
beauty  and  his  aureate,  Platonic  visions, 
and  the  heart  of  Wordsworth  in  the  pas- 
sion  and   mysticity   of   the   best   of   his 

[68] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
poetry.  Other  critics  may  have  surpassed 
liim  in  dash  and  briUiancy  of  attack;  a 
very  few,  perhaps,  were  superior  in  pro- 
found penetration  into  the  depths  of  the 
greatest  natures;  but  in  the  power  of 
sympathetic  interpretation  of  the  diverse 
writers  whom,  at  some  point,  his  tempera- 
ment touched,  and  in  the  gift  of  perfectly 
phrasing  subtile  shades  of  his  meaning, 
Walter  Pater  had  no  superiors  and  few 
peers. 

It  is,  of  course,  impossible  to  dwell  long 
upon  this  branch  of  Mr.  Pater's  work 
without  bringing  it  into  comparison  with 
that  of  the  man  whom  recent  English 
literary  opinion  has  generally  recognised 
as  its  master.  It  is  neither  possible  nor 
desirable  to  make  a  formal  comparison 

[69] 


WALTER    PATER 
between  Mr.  Pater  and  Mr.  Arnold,  or 
to  draw  up  an  estimate  to  scale,  but  it  may 
not  be  wholly  idle  to  notice  some  points 
of  opposition. 

If  we  place  Arnold's  essay  upon  Mar- 
cus Aurelius  beside  those  chapters  of 
"Marius"— the  twelfth  to  the  fifteenth— 
which  deal  with  the  same  theme,  the  dif- 
ference will  be  apparent.  And  this  dif- 
ference, so  obvious  here  in  the  treatment 
of  a  single  subject,  may  be  traced  almost 
as  easily  in  all  their  critical  writing.  Pa- 
ter's sensibilities  seem  the  keener,  and,  as 
is  to  be  expected  from  his  more  retired 
and  academic  life,  his  general  scholarship 
is  better,  his  information  more  detailed 
and  exact.  He  had  more  than  Arnold  of 
that  personal  knowledge  of  many  remote 

[70] 


CRITICISM  OF  ART  AND  LETTERS 
minor  writers  which  is  essential  to  the  full 
atmospheric  criticism  of  their  more  fa- 
mous contemporaries.  One  feels  that, 
save  for  occasional  excursions  to  the 
shrine  of  some  minor  writer  of  "distinc- 
tion," Arnold  kept  more  strictly  to  the 
highroad  of  literature,  and  in  so  doing 
lost  a  little  in  knowledge  of  the  country. 
On  the  other  hand,  Pater's  criticism  never 
moves  with  the  bright  speed  of  Ai-nold's. 
It  is  no  clear,  luciferous  stream  of  prose 
with  the  sunlight  of  humour  playing  upon 
its  surface  and  penetrating  its  depths. 
This  is  partly  a  matter  of  style,  of  which 
we  shall  presently  have  to  speak,  but, 
more  than  that,  it  is  the  result  of  a  fimda- 
mental  diversity  in  critical  mood  and 
method.     Arnold   dealt  more  in   broad, 

[71] 


WALTER  PATER 
stoical  generalisations,  "nobleness  of 
soul,"  "sweet  reasonableness,"  "sweetness 
and  light,"  and  other  "chief  and  principal 
things"  which  are  pregnant  and  luminous 
only  so  far  as  the  reader  shares  in  the 
particular  quality.  Notwithstanding  his 
struggles  of  faith,  his  foregatherings 
with  Obermann  and  Heine,  he  was  always 
Arnold  of  Rugby's  son.  He  never  lost  a 
certain  beneficent  singleness  of  mind. 
Beside  him  Pater  was  more  of  the  myr- 
iad-minded humanist,  more  like  that  typi- 
cal humanist  of  the  old  time.  Dr.  Thomas 
Browne  of  Norwich,  of  a  constitution  so 
general  that  it  consorts  and  sympathises 
with  all  things. 


[72] 


IV 

PHILOSOPHIC   FICTION    AND    THE   ART 
OF    STYLE 

Although  in  the  preceding  account  we 
have  viewed  by  anticipation  much  that 
came  after,  we  must  now  revert  to  1881 
to  pick  up  the  chronological  thread  of 
our  author's  life.  If  the  obliging  reader 
will  take  the  trouble  to  glance  at  the  bib- 
liographical table  of  Mr.  Pater's  life  and 
work  he  will  notice  that,  with  the  single 
exception  of  the  essay  upon  Rossetti, 
written  in  1883,  the  years  from  1881  to 
1885  were  given  to  the  composition  of 
his  masterpiece,  "Marius  the  Epicurean." 
Even  with  the  abundant  leisure  afforded 
by  his  academic  life,  and  with  the  addi- 
tional advantage  of  the  winter  of  1882 

[73] 


WALTER  PATER 
spent  in  Rome,  it  is  a  wonder  that  a  work 
so  full  of  significant  detail,  so  assiduously 
filed  and  polished,  so  maturely  ripened, 
could  have  been  carried  to  completion 
within  even  that  ample  time.  At  any  rate, 
so  exacting  was  the  labour  that  nothing 
else  was  done  by  Pater  within  those  years 
to  need  our  attention. 

The  publication  of  "JNIarius"  in  1885, 
coming  after  the  Renaissance  and  the 
long  series  of  notable  magazine  essays, 
finally  established  Pater's  reputation  as  a 
writer  of  very  unusual  quality  and  distinc- 
tion. It  was  received  almost  everywhere 
with  the  highest  terms  of  respect  in  the 
professional  reviewer's  phrase-book,  and 
at  the  hands  of  at  least  two  critics,  Mr. 
Sharp  in  the  Athenceum  and  Mr.  Wood- 

[74] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
berry  in  the  Nation,  it  met  something  hke 
adequate  and  discriminating  appreciation. 
It  was  felt  at  once  by  discriminating 
readers  that  Marius  himself  was  not  so 
much  an  ancient  Epicurean,  or  even  the 
perennial  type  of  the  sesthetic  moralist,  as 
the  protagonist  of  a  certain  tendency 
which  the  author  held  to  be  vital  in  the 
thoughtful  life  of  his  own  age;  or,  per- 
haps, a  lyrical  personage  feigned  for  pur- 
poses of  self -explanation.  It  was  upon 
this  ground  that  the  book  deserved  and 
found  recognition.  But  this  matter  of  the 
new  Cyrenaicism  or  the  sesthetical  conduct 
of  life  is  best  deferred  to  a  later  chapter. 
All  that  need  be  done  now  is  to  notice 
some  of  the  more  obvious  qualities  of  the 
book. 

[75] 


WALTER  PATER 
Persons  of  taste  and  cultivation  were 
attracted  to  "Marius"  chiefly  by  three 
traits:  by  the  richness  of  the  scholarship 
displayed  in  it,  by  the  power  of  the  inter- 
pretative imagination  —  which  conceived 
the  life  of  Marius  sharply  and  clearlj^ 
amid  his  so  various  environment,  subordi- 
nating each  learned  and  archieological  de- 
tail to  its  due  place  in  the  whole  composi- 
tion— and  by  its  suave  and  seductive  grace 
of  style.  The  deftly  inlaid  episodes,  like 
that  beautifully  light  and  poetic  version 
of  "Cupid  and  Psyche"  done  out  of  Apu- 
leius,  or  the  eloquent  oration  of  Aurelius, 
cunningly  developed  out  of  his  INIedita- 
tions,  were  done  on  the  highest  level  of 
Pater's  art.  But  nowhere  is  his  peculiar 
ability  seen  to  better  advantage  than  in 

[76] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
the  delicious  Socratic  dialogue  between 
Lucian  and  Hermotimus.  Berkeley  or 
Landor,  even  FitzGerald,  never  handled 
the  form  better.  Indeed  it  might  almost 
have  been  done  by  Plato  himself.  There 
is  in  it  the  tortuous  yet  steady  progression 
of  thought  relieved  by  dramatic  turns  and 
quick,  subtile  reverses,  which  is  the  prime 
charm  of  form  in  Plato's  art.  The  doc- 
trinaire boy  Hermotimus,  caught  in  the 
logical  net  by  the  systematic  scepticism  of 
Lucian,  struggles  as  naturally  and  inef- 
fectually as  Crito  or  Protagoras  enmeshed 
by  Socrates.  And  it  is  all  presented  in 
an  admirably  concrete  and  analogical 
style,  enlivened  by  little  apologues  quite 
in  the  manner  of  Plato. 

After    the    publication    of    "Marius," 

[77] 


WALTER  PATER 
slight  changes  may  be  seen  in  the  man- 
ner of  Pater's  hfe  and  in  the  direction  of 
his  Hterary  activities.  In  1886  he  took  a 
house  at  Kensington.  From  this  time  on 
he  came  more  and  more  to  be  in  demand 
as  a  lecturer  and  as  a  reviewer  extraordi- 
nary of  new  books  of  a  kind  that  appealed 
to  him.  In  the  period  of  his  residence  at 
Kensington  he  contributed  some  twenty 
long  and  careful  review  articles,  both 
signed  and  unsigned,  to  the  Guardian^ 
the  Nineteenth  Century,  the  Pall  Mall 
Gazette,  and  the  Athenceum.  Some  of 
these,  like  the  notice  of  Mrs.  Ward's 
"Amiel's  Journal,"  are  little  essays  or 
appreciations,  quite  in  his  familiar  vein. 
While  the  majority  are  occasional  papers 
of  small  permanent  interest,  none  is  de- 

[78] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
void  of  very  considerable  siiggestiveness 
to  the  critic  of  Pater's  personality  and 
literary  product.  As  a  reviewer  he  was 
genial,  sympathetic,  friendly;  eager  to 
praise  and  loth  to  censure,  often  passing 
in  silence  defects  which  he  could  not  have 
failed  to  observe.  The  review  of  "Robert 
Elsmere,"  for  example,  is  typical  of  all. 
Here,  as  in  all  his  reviews  of  fiction,  Pater 
is  unaffectedly  delighted  with  the  people 
and  their  story,  and  has  no  excessive  con- 
cern for  social  or  theological  problems 
which  may  be  involved  in  the  plot.  But 
it  is  important  to  notice  that  what  little 
he  does  have  to  say  concerning  this  last 
matter  is  in  a  somewhat  deprecatory  and 
churchman-like  vein.  The  style  of  these 
papers    is    also    remarkable.      It    is,    of 

[79] 


WALTER  PATER 
course,  less  carefully  wrought  than  usual 
with  him,  more  brisk  and  buoyant,  and 
written  with  a  more  running  pen.  But  at 
times,  when  led  by  habit  into  a  long  sen- 
tence, without  the  time  for  his  wonted 
phlegmatic  correction,  he  produced  peri- 
ods so  obscure  and  cumbersome  as  to  be 
unparalleled  elsewhere  in  his  work. 

One  of  the  effects  of  the  long  labour 
of  "  Marius"  was  to  develop  the  creative 
element  of  Pater's  genius,  to  increase  his 
skill  at  a  certain  sort  of  narrative.  With 
the  exception  of  "The  Child  in  the 
House,"  printed  in  a  magazine  in  1878, 
all  of  his  work  to  1881  had  consisted  in 
the  criticism  or  interpretation  of  art  and 
letters.  As  we  have  seen,  a  creative  ele- 
ment was  involved  even  in  this;  but  with 

[80] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
"Marius"  he  came  to  be  a  writer  of  imag- 
inative philosophic  studies,  cast  in  the 
form  of  mieventful  fiction.  Afterward 
came  the  series  of  four  imaginary  por- 
traits, "A  Prince  of  Court  Painters," 
"Denys  L'Auxerrois,"  "Sebastian  Van 
Storck,"  and  "Duke  Carl  of  Rosenmold," 
all  printed  in  Mac7nillans  Magazine  from 
1885  to  1887,  and  collected  into  a  volume 
in  the  latter  year.  Then  in  1888,  in  the 
same  magazine,  came  the  five  chapters  of 
"Gaston  de  Latour,"  which  have  brought 
delight  to  many.  In  1889  he  wrote  a  very 
similar  study,  one  of  his  rarest  achieve- 
ments in  poetic  symbolism,  "Hippolytus 
Unveiled."  "Emerald  Uthwart,"  printed 
in  1892,  was  nearest  of  all  to  the  ordinary 
type  of  fiction  in  which  things  happen, 

[81] 


WALTER  PATER 
and  least  heavily  freighted  with  philo- 
sophic lore.  Finally,  in  1893,  appeared 
that  delightfully  suggestive  fantasy  of 
the  after-movement  of  the  Hellenic  spirit, 
"Apollo  in  Picardy." 

To  sympathetic  readers,  who  fell  upon 
these  studies  damp  from  the  press,  there 
came  upon  the  instant  a  perception  of 
their  beauty  and  power  which  set  them 
far  apart  from  the  mass  of  current  litera- 
ture. And,  indeed,  they  are  by  no  means 
the  least  enduring  part  of  Pater's  work. 
They  contain  many  passages  of  sound 
and  suggestive  artistic,  literary,  or  philo- 
sophic criticism,  and  much  of  the  imagi- 
native, poetic  criticism  of  life  which  is  the 
business  of  creative  literature.  Hippol- 
ytus,  through  all  his  ardent  youth,   de- 

[82] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
voted  to  the  pursuit  of  remote  and  diffi- 
cult wisdom;  Sebastian  Van  Storck,  the 
remorseless,  Spinozistic  idealist,  who,  by 
forsaking  the  actual  humanities  of  life, 
comes  to  strange  grief — these  and  the  rest 
are  rare  but  universal  types.  They  have 
a  special  meaning  to  modern  young  men 
of  an  uncommercial  turn.  Finally,  it  is  in 
these  portraits  and  fantasies  that  the 
Pateresque  style  is  found  in  its  most 
characteristic  and  elaborate  individuality. 

It  is  with  diffidence  and  concern  that 
one  approaches  a  theme  which,  as  many 
critics  would  assert,  involves  Pater's  chief 
merit  and  distinction,  and,  as  some  of  the 
wicked  hold,  his  peculiar  offence  —  his 
style  or  literary  manner.     In   1888   his 

[83] 


WALTER  PATER 
famous  essay  on  "Style"  was  published 
in  the  Fortnightly  Review,  to  be  printed 
a  year  later  as  the  initial  or  tonic  paper 
in  his  collected  "Appreciations."  This, 
then,  is  the  logical  and  chronological  place 
in  which  to  take  some  account  of  his  sty- 
listic theory  and  prpctice.  This  account 
may  perhaps  fulfil  our  impression  of  his 
work  hitherto,  and  may  bridge  the  way 
to  a  final  summary  of  his  philosophy  of 
life. 

The  essay  on  "Style"  is  a  plea  for  the 
cultivation  of  consciously  artistic  and 
scholarly  prose  to  offset  the  crude,  slap- 
dash impressionism,  which  Pater  felt  to 
be  the  cardinal  sin  of  the  prose  of  his 
time.  With  Flaubert  for  his  master  and 
model,  he  writes  both  soundly  and  seduc- 

[84] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
lively  of  "charm  and  lucid  order  and 
labour  of  the  file."  The  ends  of  style  he 
held  to  be  beauty  and  expressiveness.  He 
would  have  agreed  with  Spencer  that  the 
fundamental  principle  of  it  is  the  econ- 
omy of  attention,  and  with  IVIichelangelo 
that  it  consists  in  the  purgation  of  super- 
fluities ;  but,  with  a  rather  unusually  com- 
plex notion  of  the  meaning  of  "beauty" 
and  "expressiveness,"  he  demanded  more 
of  prose  style  than  might  at  first  seem  to 
be  involved  in  those  famous  formulae. 
Pater's  artistic  ideal  demanded  full  and 
precise  truth  in  the  expression  of  his 
thought.  This  meant  the  thoughtful  ma- 
nipulation of  sentences  into  as  exact  con- 
formity as  might  be  with  the  subtile 
intentions  of  his   own   mind.      This,   he 

[85] 


WALTER  PATER 
taught,  might  be  attained  by  a  fourfold 
effort:  by  closely  meditated  architectonic 
structure  to  attain  the  ordo  concatenati- 
oque  veri;  by  scholarly  advantage  taken 
of  the  minutest  principles  of  syntax;  by 
an  attention  to  musical  cadence,  so  to 
work  upon  the  mood  of  the  reader  as  to 
bring  it  to  accord  with  the  writer's  mood ; 
and,  finally,  by  an  unflagging  quest  of 
the  proper  word,  the  one  predestined 
mate  for  each  single  meaning. 

To  look  at  the  question  from  a  more 
technical  point  of  view.  Pater's  ideal  of 
a  good  style,  like  all  such  theories,  was  a 
matter  mainly  of  two  things — sentence 
structure  and  diction.  Of  the  first  he  had 
said,  in  a  sentence  of  a  form  singularly 
illustrative   of   its   content:   "The  blithe, 

[86] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
crisp  sentence,  decisive  as  a  child's  ex- 
pression of  its  needs,  may  alternate  with 
the  long-contending,  victoriously  intricate 
sentence,  the  sentence  born  with  the  in- 
tegrity of  a  single  word,  reheving  the 
sort  of  sentence  in  which,  if  you  look 
closely,  you  can  see  much  contrivance, 
much  adjustment  to  bring  a  highly  quah- 
fied  matter  into  comjDass  at  one  view." 

As  for  that  one  inevitable  word.  Pater 
saw  that  in  holding  this  to  be  actually 
attainable,  Flaubert  had  entered  upon  a 
belief  which  must  ultimately  bring  him 
to  despair.  No  matter  how  proper  the 
words,  mere  linguistic  symbols,  with  all 
their  wealth  of  association,  can  never  im- 
part all  the  fulness  of  the  creative  idea, 
with  its  warmth  and  colour  and  vital  glow, 

[87] 


WALTER  PATER 
its  silver  lights  and  silences.  But  he  held, 
nevertheless,  that  like  the  philosophic  pur- 
suit of  truth,  irrespective  of  the  attain- 
ment or  non-attainment  of  the  absolute, 
the  artistic  quest  of  the  one  veracious 
word  brought  its  own  reward.  In  short, 
Pater's  effort  was  always  directed  toward 
the  attainment  of  fine  and  full  veracity, 
"the  whole  truth."  It  is  a  thousand  pities 
that  the  high-falutin  ravage  of  some  of 
his  imitators  has  brought  discredit  upon 
Pater.  This  confused  injustice  is  doubt- 
less a  mark  of  an  intellectual  flabbiness 
incapable  of  appreciating  the  austerity  of 
mind  which,  in  Pater's  case,  lay  under  the 
manner. 

This  was  Pater's  theory  of  style,  and 
his  practice  shows  a  much  stricter  agree- 

[88] 


PHILOSOPHIC    FICTION 
ment  with  it  than  is  often  to  be  found 
between    these    two    discordant    sisters. 
Pater's  prose  is  obviously  not  Attic  prose. 
Matthew  Arnold  and  Cardinal  Newman, 
among   the   Victorians,    came   nearer   to 
that,  and  how  diiFerent  they  are  from 
Pater!    ISTor  is  it  Asiatic;  it  has  little  of 
De  Quincey's  florid  luxuriance,  his  Cice- 
ronian rhythms,  and  Persian  pomp.     To 
keep  to  the  figure  for  suggestion  rather 
than  definition,  Pater's  style  is  African  in 
its  flavour.     It  is  a  characteristic  product 
of   an   Alexandrine   society,   too   urbane 
ever  to  be  grandiloquent,  yet  too  curious 
in  its  scholarship,  too  profuse  of  its  sym- 
pathies to  be  quite  content  with  simple, 
Addisonian  clarity. 

Walter  Pater  might  have  said  with  an 

[89] 


WALTER  PATER 
essayist  of  old  time:  "To  me  a  cursus 
'philosophicus  is  an  impertinency  in  folio 
and  the  reading  of  it  a  laborious  idleness." 
His  own  work  was  always  in  the  form  of 
the  essay;  for,  in  a  very  real  sense,  the 
chapters  of  "Marius"  or  "Plato  and  Pla- 
tonism"  are  essays  at  many  subjects. 
Now,  like  the  eclogue  in  poetry,  the  essay 
has  many  and  peculiar  advantages  for 
him  who  would  arrive  as  near  as  may  be 
to  perfection  of  form.  It  is  long  enough 
to  afford  an  orderly  and  fairly  compre- 
hensive view  of  its  subject,  and  so  short 
as  to  admit  of  repeated  polishings  and 
the  most  minute  care  for  all  the  smallest 
details  of  composition.  Of  this  property 
in  his  form  Pater  took  conscientious  ad- 
vantage.    He  wrote,  it  is  said,  with  the 

[90] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
most  painful  toiling;  sometimes  his  work 
produced  such  utter  exhaustion  that — 
with  his  mind  "lined  with  black,"  as  old 
Burton  would  say — he  could  find  no  good 
in  his  most  perfect  periods.  The  method 
of  his  composition  has  been  often  re- 
counted. The  first  draft  of  an  essay  was 
written  upon  specially  prepared  paper 
with  the  lines  far  apart,  each  word  widely 
detached  from  its  fellows.  Then  he 
would  go  over  and  over  it,  filling  in  be- 
tween the  lines,  qualifying,  amplifying, 
intensifying,  until  the  page  brimmed  over 
with  words.  Then  he  would  copy  it  out 
in  the  same  way  as  at  first,  and  begin  the 
process  of  revision  anew.  This  he  would 
do  many  times,  until  the  result  satisfied 
him  in  sufficient  measure  for  publication. 

[91] 


WALTER  PATER 
But  sometimes,  before  this  consmmna- 
tion,  he  would  have  the  galley-proofs  of 
an  essay  struck  off  at  his  own  expense, 
that  by  actually  seeing  his  work  in  type 
he  might  revise  or  rearrange  it  to  better 
advantage.  He  has  been  called  by  some 
a  slovenly  writer,  but  while  there  are  cer- 
tain mannerisms  in  his  work  which,  from 
one  point  of  view,  might  seem  to  give 
some  colour  of  truth  to  this  characterisa- 
tion, it  is,  nevertheless,  a  misconception  of 
his  quality.  There  are  singularly  few 
evidences  of  actual  carelessness  anywhere 
in  his  writings. 

Pater  was,  indeed,  pre-eminently  a 
scholarly  writer.  This  does  not  mean 
that  he  was  quite  a  purist.  He  was  not 
above  coining  a  form  if  it  served  his  turn, 

[92] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
and  for  certain  French  words  and  relative 
constructions  he  had  a  fondness  hardly 
warranted  under  the  self-denying  ordi- 
nance of  the  purist.  But  he  was  a  schol- 
arly writer  in  his  use  of  the  rich  resources 
of  the  English  tongue.  He  plays  deftly, 
for  example,  with  the  archaic,  radical 
meaning  of  words  like  expresSj,  entertain^ 
or  mortifiedj,  never  using  the  inherent, 
hidden  meaning  so  crassly  as  to  perturb 
the  untutored  reader,  yet  always  with  a 
•retrospective,  pictorial  turn  which  de- 
lights the  scholar.  Like  all  good  writers 
he  was  exquisitely  sensitive  to  the  expres- 
sive shading  and  colour  of  language. 
With  him,  as  with  Marlus,  "his  general 
sense  of  a  fitness  and  beauty  in  words 
became  eiFective  in  daintily  pliant  sen- 

[93] 


WALTER    PATER 
tences,  with  all  sorts  of  felicitous  linking 
of  figure  to  abstraction." 

This  linking  of  figure  to  abstraction  is, 
perhaps,  the  most  salient  feature  of  Pa- 
ter's style.  Even  when  treating  philo- 
sophic subjects  the  visible  is  everywhere 
predominant  in  his  pages.  Beautiful  ob- 
jects, landscapes,  persons  are  always  his 
primar}^  interest;  but  these  are  so  subli- 
mated by  the  chrysopoetic  alchemy  of  his 
style  that  they  often  attain  a  profound 
suggestiveness  unattainable  in  more  ab-« 
stract  composition.  He  had,  indeed, 
something  of  the  lyric  pantheism  which 
can  make  the  flower  of  the  field  or  the 
cloud  in  the  sky  or  a  stranger's  face 
vehicles  of  personal  sentiment  and  pas- 
sion. 

[94] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
It  was  largely  by  virtue  of  this  gift 
that  he  was  enabled  to  express  his  inti- 
macies of  thought  and  observation,  and 
so  to  make  a  certain  subtile  intimacy  the 
chief  characteristic  of  his  writing.  It  was 
thus  that  he  arrived  at  what  he  defined  in 
another  as  "That  impress  of  a  personal 
quality,  a  profound  expressiveness,  what 
the  French  call  intimite,  by  which  is 
meant  some  subtile  sense  of  originality — 
the  seal  on  a  man's  work  of  what  is  most 
inward  and  peculiar  in  his  moods  and 
manner  of  apprehension :  it  is  what  we  call 
expression  carried  to  its  highest  intensity 
of  degree."  In  this  respect  Pater's  mood 
and  manner  are  as  every  true  artist's  must 
be,  essentially  unique.  Other  men  can 
produce  the  subtile,  intimate,  Pateresque 

[95] 


WALTER    PATER 
effect  once  in  a  while,  but  he  alone  could 
do  it  continuously  and  consistently,  with 
a  singular  cumulative  felicity. 

On  the  other  hand,  his  manner  of  com- 
position had  its  grave  disadvantages.  It 
can  be  maintained,  with  much  assurance, 
that  it  would  have  been  better  for  Pater 
had  he,  as  a  young  man,  been  driven 
by  some  temporal  necessity  to  write  rap- 
idly under  pressure.  The  most  noticeable 
quality  of  his  style  is  the  very  opposite  of 
verve. 

His  work  as  a  whole  lacks  energy, 
speed,  carrying  power.  He  had  a  paren- 
thetical mind.  The  very  Genius  of  Quali- 
fication followed  him  through  all  his 
thinking.  And,  all  too  often  in  his  wri- 
ting, instead  of  selecting  from  among  the 

[96] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
possible  qualifications  of  his  idea,  he  gives 
them  all.  Hence  came  the  somewhat 
gelatinous  quality  of  his  style  in  his  less 
inspired  moments.  It  is  translucent,  shim- 
mering with  colour,  but  not  firm,  trans- 
parent, crystalline ;  yet,  if  by  this  peculiar 
individuality  of  his  manner  he  loses  in 
influence  with  the  running  reader,  it  may 
be  that  he  makes  a  corresponding  and 
compensating  gain  with  the  more  atten- 
tive student  in  his  closet.  His  excessive 
modification  is  often  to  his  reader. truly 
a  delightful  modification — a  making  of 
mood.  And  though  he  is  a  dangerous 
pattern  of  style  for  the  young  writer 
when  he  appends  modifying  clause  after 
clause  to  the  wrong  side  of  the  proper 
predicate,  yet  even  in  these  loose  periods, 

[97] 


WALTER  PATER 
he  attains,  by  virtue  of  their  very  laxity, 
a  kind  of  languorous  cadence  very  suit- 
able to  his  elegiac  prose.  Only  it  must 
be  confessed  that  Pater  is  not  an  author 
to  read  straight  through.  Even  the  most 
sympathetic  reader — perhaps  because  of 
some  original  sin  of  taste  in  him — will  be- 
come at  last  a  little  cloyed  by  such  unre- 
lieved intimacy.  He  will  yearn  for  read- 
ing that  is  rude  and  breezy,  and  sigh  for 
the  lusty  company  of  Nick  Bottom,  or 
Sancho  Panza,  or  Tom  Jones. 

Yet  it  is  not,  as  some  have  thought, 
solemnity  of  which  the  reader  is  weary. 
For  Pater,  though  never  witty,  is  essen- 
tially a  humourous  writer.  This  may 
seem  a  dark  saying,  but  the  true  admirer 
of  Pater  will  readily  understand  what  is 

[98] 


PHILOSOPHIC  FICTION 
meant.  There  is  always  behind  his  page 
a  subtile  and  sustained  recognition  of  an 
endless  incongruity  in  the  scheme  of 
things.  In  real  life  he  was,  as  we  have 
seen,  gleeful  and  childlike  in  the  playful 
simplicity  of  his  humour ;  yet,  in  his  work, 
his  mood,  though  still  humourous,  or,  at 
least,  vaguely  humoursome,  becomes  as 
mature  and  inscrutable  as  the  smile  of 
Mona  Lisa.  It  is  hard  to  say  whether  it  is 
humour  just  ready  to  sadden  into  pathos 
or  pathos  about  to  gleam  into  humour. 
Carlyle  and  Lamb  had  that  mingling,  too, 
but  with  them  the  alternate  change  was 
constantly  occurring,  while  with  Pater  it 
almost  never  occurred.  His  normal  mood, 
like  Lady  Lisa's  smile,  was  delicately 
poised  between  sadness  and  mirth.     Per- 

[99] 


WALTER    PATER 

haps  it  was  another  symbol  of  *'the  mod- 
ern idea." 

We  are  never  tired  of  saying  that  im- 
aginative prose  is  the  typical  art  of  our 
time;  that  by  virtue  of  its  flexible  expres- 
siveness it  is  best  fitted  to  portray  inward 
circumstance  of  complexity  and  contra- 
diction. It  is  as  a  writer  of  such  prose  as 
this  that  Pater  is  a  significant  figure  in 
English  literary  history.  If  his  style  is 
not  the  briskest  and  most  strenuous,  be- 
cause the  strain  of  life  he  stands  for  is  not 
the  briskest  and  most  strenuous,  is  it  for 
that  any  the  less  good  style?  The  final 
question,  can  art  become  permanent  by 
perfect  expressiveness  alone?  may  be  left 
open.  But  surely  it  is  by  virtue  of  just 
such  perfect  expressiveness  that  Pater's 

[  100  ] 


PHILOSOPHIC    FICTION 
eight  volumes  are  likely  to  remain  a  treas- 
ure "for  the  delighted  reading  of  a  schol- 
ar, willing  to  ponder  at  leisure,  to  make 
his  way  slowly  and  understand." 


[101] 


V 

"THE  NEW  CYRENAICISM" 
After  the  publication  of  "The  Renais- 
sance" in  1873,  the  reviews,  becoming 
aware  of  the  reHgious  and  philosophic 
scepticism  which  it  implied,  and  the  pe- 
culiar theory  of  ethics  which  it  explicitly- 
defended,  speedily  bestowed  upon  its  au- 
thor the  then  (and  still)  reproachful 
name  of  "Hedonist."  Fearful  of  misun- 
derstanding, Pater,  in  1877,  withdrew  the 
summary  "Conclusion"  from  the  second 
edition.  Then  in  "Marius,"  and  especial- 
ly in  the  chapter  entitled  "The  New  Cy- 
renaicism,"  he  attempted  a  more  elaborate 
exposition  and  defence  of  his  beliefs. 
Finally,  in  1888,  in  the  third  edition 
of  "The  Renaissance,"  he  reinstated  that 

[  10'^  ] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

portentous  "Conclusion,"  with  slight 
changes,  he  says,  to  bring  it  nearer  to  his 
original  meaning,  but  really,  one  fancies, 
to  his  meaning  as  modified  by  maturity. 
Henceforth  his  "Cyrenaicism"  was  fairly 
understood,  and  respected  accordingly. 
It  should  be  of  advantage  to  us,  then,  to 
study  Pater's  philosophy  of  life  as  a 
whole  under  this  self -chosen  name.  This 
should  aid  one  to  conceive  more  clearly 
the  purport  and  development  of  his  opin- 
ions, and  it  should  help  one  to  a  better 
understanding  of  the  intricate,  Pater- 
esque  tendency  in  recent  life  and  letters. 
Perhaps  not  every  schoolboy  knows 
that  Cyrenaicism  was  a  system  of  thought 
and  conduct  bred  in  the  mind  of  Aristip- 
pus  of  Cyrene.     This  person,  who  was  a 

[103] 


WALTER    PATER 

contemporary  of  Socrates,  held  that  all 
knowledge  is  relative  to  the  perceiving 
mind,  that  we  can  never  really  know  the 
thing  in  itself,  that,  since  this  is  the  case, 
'  the  chief  end  of  life  should  be  the  pursuit 
of  high  intellectual  pleasure  or  well-being 
in  an  enduring  state  of  contentment.  A 
follower  of  Aristippus,  one  Euhemerus, 
developed  his  system  into  a  very  ration- 
alistic philosophy  of  religion;  another, 
Hegesias,  developed  it  into  a  kind  of  ideal 
pessimism,  as  Schopenhauer  and  Leopardi 
did  later.  Hegesias  became  known  by 
the  appellation  of  "Persuader-to-Death," 
from  the  disconcerting  fact  that  his  class 
in  philosophy  was  more  than  decimated 
by  suicide  of  its  members.  But  in  the 
thought  of  its  founder  the  Cyrenaic  sys- 

[104] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

tern  had  greater  affinities  with  idealism 
of  the  more  buoyant  sort,  and,  as  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  Aristippus  before  he  died 
became  practically  a  member  of  the  So- 
cratic  school.  All  these  tendencies  in  or- 
der were  exemplified  in  the  course  taken 
by  the  Cyrenaicism  of  Walter  Pater. 

As  we  have  seen,  there  were  always 
traceable  in  him  two  conflicting  mental 
dispositions.  There  was  an  abstracting, 
idealising,  centripetal  motive,  tending  to 
Puritanism  or  Pantheism  in  religion, 
counterbalanced  by  a  more  materialistic 
centrifugal  force  that  found  its  natural 
religious  affinities  in  very  diverse  quar- 
ters, in  polytheistic  Paganism,  in  Catholi- 
cism, or  even  in  agnosticism.  But  while 
these  tendencies  may  be  distinguished  by 

[  105  ] 


WALTER  PATER 

a  theoretical  analysis,  practically  they 
were  merged  into  indivisible,  inalienable 
unity  by  the  fusing  power  of  personality. 
In  his  younger  days  he  was,  like  Marius, 
"a  materialist  with  something  of  the  tem- 
per of  a  devotee." 

But  this  twy-formed  temperament, 
nourished  on  curious  philosophic  studies, 
led  him  into  scepticism.  The  chief  con- 
tention of  the  "Conclusion"  to  "The  Re- 
naissance" is  that  old  one  of  the  vanity 
of  dogmatising.  After  much  pi'eoccupa- 
tion  with  the  divisions  of  the  sensible  and 
the  intelligible  worlds,  with  the  opposition 
of  relative  and  absolute  truth,  he  is  led  at 
last  to  distrust  even  that  measure  of  abso- 
lute truth  which  may  be  asserted  to  be 
inherent  in  the  very  constitution  of  mind 

[106] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

as  mind.  Of  late  the  extension  of  psy^ 
chology  and  the  rise  of  the  philosophic 
movement,  which  has  taken  for  its  watch- 
word "Back  to  Kant!"  has  made  a  behef 
in  this  measure  of  miiversality  tolerably 
easy.  But  in  the  sixties  and  early  seven- 
ties, when  Darwinism,  still  imperfectly 
understood,  had  all  the  romantic  charm  of 
a  new  cosmic  theory,  when  Mill  and  Hux- 
ley were  in  their  prime  and  German  ideal- 
ism had  fallen  into  its  dotage,  avoidance 
of  this  sort  of  philosophic  scepticism  was 
a  more  difficult  matter — practically  im- 
possible for  those  temperamentally  in- 
clined toward  it.  Pater  at  the  time  of 
writing  the  "Renaissance"  did  not  avoid 
it.  He  fell  to  pondering  upon  the  eternal 
flux  of  things,  until  not  Heraclitus  liim- 

[107] 


WALTER    PATER 

self  could  have  expressed  the  shorelessness 
of  the  strange  seas  of  thought  more  strik- 
mgly.     In  the  "Conclusion"  he  writes: 

"Or  if  we  begin  with  the  inward  world 
of  thought  and  feeling,  the  whirlpool  is 
still  more  rapid,  the  flame  more  eager  and 
devouring.  There  it  is  no  longer  the 
gradual  darkening  of  the  eye  and  fading 
of  colour  from  the  wall — the  movement 
of  the  shore-side,  where  the  water  flows 
down  indeed,  though  in  apparent  rest — 
but  the. race  of  the  mid-stream,  a  drift  of 
momentary  acts  of  sight  and  passion  and 
thought.  At  first  sight,  experience  seems 
to  bury  us  under  a  flood  of  external  ob- 
jects, pressing  upon  us  with  a  sharp  and 
importunate  reality,  calling  us  out  of  our- 
selves in  a  thousand  forms  of  action.    But 

[108] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

when  reflection  begins  to  act  upon  those 
objects  they  are  dissipated  under  its  in- 
fluence; the  cohesive  force  seems  sus- 
pended hke  a  trick  of  magic;  each  object 
is  loosed  into  a  group  of  impressions — 
colour,  odour,  texture — in  the  mind  of  the 
observer.  And  if  we  continue  to  dwell  in 
thought  on  this  world,  not  of  objects  in 
the  solidity  with  which  language  invests 
them,  but  of  impressions,  unstable,  flick- 
ering, inconsistent,  which  burn  and  are 
extinguished  with  our  consciousness  of 
them,  it  contracts  still  further;  the  whole 
scope  of  observation  is  dwarfed  to  the 
narrow  chamber  of  the  individual  mind. 
Experience,  already  reduced  to  a  swarm 
of  impressions,  is  ringed  round  for  each 
of  us  by  that  thick  wall  of  personality, 

[109] 


WALTER  PATER 

through  which  no  real  voice  has  ever 
pierced  on  its  way  to  us,  or  from  us  to 
that  which  we  can  only  conjecture  to  be 
without.  Every  one  of  those  impressions 
is  the  impression  of  the  individual  in  his 
isolation,  each  mind  keeping  as  a  solitary 
prisoner  its  own  dream  of  a  world.  Anal- 
ysis goes  a  step  further  still,  and  assures 
us  that  those  impressions  of  the  individual 
mind  to  which,  for  each  one  of  us,  experi- 
ence dwindles  down,  are  in  perpetual 
flight;  that  each  of  them  is  limited  by 
time,  and  that  as  time  is  infinitely  divis- 
ible, each  of  them  is  infinitely  divisible 
also;  all  that  is  actual  in  it,  being  a  single 
moment,  gone  while  we  try  to  apprehend 
it,  of  which  it  may  ever  be  more  truly  said 
that  it  has  ceased  to  be  than  that  it  is.    To 

[  110] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

such  a  tremulous  wisp  constantly  reform- 
ing itself  on  the  stream,  to  a  single  sharp 
impression,  with  a  sense  in  it,  a  relic  more 
or  less  fleeting,  of  such  moments  gone  by, 
what  is  real  in  our  life  fines  itself  down. 
It  is  with  this  movement,  with  the  passage 
and  dissolution  of  impressions,  images, 
sensations,  that  analysis  leaves  off — that 
continual  vanishing  away,  that  strange, 
perpetual  weaving  and  unweaving  of  our- 
selves." 

It  must  be  confessed  that  the  first  effect 
of  such  a  passage  as  this  is  but  to  produce 
a  disturbing  sense  of  the  shiftiness  of 
thought.  It  seems  the  expression  of  a 
"weird  seizure,"  like  those  to  which  the 
young  prince  in  Tennyson  was  unfortu- 
nately subject,  or  those  which  befall  the 

[111] 


WALTER    PATER 

sensitive  reader  of  Calderon's  "Life  is  a 
Dream."  It  is  pretty  certain  that  in  stat- 
ing the  case  for  scepticism  Pater  has  bent 
the  stick,  in  his  efforts  to  straighten  it,  too 
much  the  other  way.  But  at  any  rate  it 
was  by  such  considerations  as  these  that 
he  came  to  distrust  all  dogmatisms.  The 
choice  of  a  philosophy,  he  says,  is  a  mat- 
ter of  temperament,  and  the  service  of  it, 
he  adds,  quoting  Xovalis,  is  simply  to 
vivify  and  dephlegmatise  our  stolid  and 
self-satisfied  minds.    As  he  said: 

"Philosophy  serves  culture  not  by  the 
fancied  gift  of  absolute  or  transcendental 
knowledge,  but  by  suggesting  questions 
which  help  one  to  detect  the  passion  and 
strangeness  and  dramatic  contrasts  of 
life."    So  he  fell  into  a  liking  for  all  phil- 

[112] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

osophies,  in  so  far  as  they  were  poetic  or 
suggestive.  Idealism,  materialism,  stoi- 
cism, epicureanism,  all,  somewhere,  re- 
ceived luminous  exposition  at  his  hands. 
But  upon  none  of  them  could  he  heartily 
bestow  his  allegiance.  His  own  sympathy 
lay  with  the  reserved  judgment  of  Soc- 
rates and  Montaigne. 

Most  moralising  sceptics  in  philosophy 
have  made  the  end  of  their  scepticism 
the  attainment  of  "ataraxia,"  or  a  genial, 
untroubled  equanimity.  This  was  not 
the  end  wliich  Pater  proposed  to  him- 
self. Neither  was  he,  even  in  his  younger 
days,  precisely  of  the  Cyrenaic  school  of 
such  men  as  Pepys  and  Beckford  and 
Temple,  who,  esteeming  human  life  as 
but  a  "froward  child,"  would  soothe  and 

[113] 


WALTER  PATER 

cozen  it  with  toys  and  pretty  games  until 
it  fall  asleep.  Neither  was  he  of  those 
who  sport  considerably  with  Amaryllis  in 
the  shade,  and  still  less,  even  in  his  "warm 
blood  and  canicular  days,"  was  he  of  those 
who  follow  in  the  train  of  Lais.  This  was 
"the  lower  Cyrenaicism"  perennial  in  all 
ages ;  his  should  be  higher.  If  for  him  the 
eye  must  be  the  determining  influence  in 
life,  he  must  strive  to  be  of  the  number 
of  those  "made  perfect  by  the  love  of 
visible  beauty." 

This,  however,  was  the  result  of  a  slow- 
ly ripening  growth.  If  we  compare  the 
doctrines  of  the  "Renaissance"  with  those 
of  "Marius"  we  shall  discover  a  signifi- 
cant evolution.  In  the  earlier  volume, 
where  he  is  concerned  with  the  pomp  and 

[114] 


"THE  NEW  CYRENAICISM" 
glory  of  the  Italian  Renaissance,  its  de- 
votion to  sensuous  beauty  and  poetic  pas- 
sions, his  position  is  nearer  to  what  men 
have  understood  by  Hedonism.  The  su- 
preme question  of  life,  he  thinks  then,  is, 
"How  shall  we  pass  most  swiftly  from 
point  to  point,  and  be  present  always  at 
the  focus  where  the  greatest  number  of 
vital  forces  unite  in  their  purest  energy?" 
"To  bm*n  always,"  he  says,  "with  this 
hard,  gemlike  flame,  to  maintain  this 
ecstasy  is  success  in  life.  .  .  .  While  all 
melts  beneath  our  feet  we  may  well  catch 
at  any  exquisite  passion,  or  any  contribu- 
tion to  knowledge  that  seems  by  a  lifted 
horizon  to  set  the  spirit  free  for  a  moment, 
or  any  stirring  of  the  senses,  strange  dyes, 
strange  colours,  and  curious  odours,  or  the 

[115] 


WALTER    PATER 

work  of  the  artist's  hand,  or  the  face  of 
one's  friend.  Not  to  discriminate  every 
moment  some  passionate  attitude  in  those 
about  us,  and  in  the  brilHancy  of  their 
gifts,  some  tragic  dividing  of  forces  on 
their  waj^s,  is,  on  this  short  day  of  frost 
and  sun,  to  sleep  before  evening." 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  ideal  life  shad- 
owed forth  in  such  sentences  could  never 
be  the  life  of  the  jaded.  Sybaritic  person 
or  of  the  vague-eyed  aesthete,  sometimes 
thought  to  belong  to  the  school  of  Pater. 
It  is,  rather,  the  peculiar  ideal  of  the 
ardent  yet  fastidious  young  man  whose 
receptive  powers  have  ripened  early;  such 
a  young  man,  for  example,  as  Goethe  was 
upon  a  time,  or  Browning.  But,  as  actu- 
ally in  the  case  of  Goethe,  so  theoretically 

[116] 


"THE  NEW  CYRENAICISM" 
in  the  case  of  Pater,  all  this  was  liahle  to 
serious  objection  on  the  ground  of  its 
tendency.  There  was  small  place  in  this 
ethical  scheme  for  any  restraining  or  in- 
hibitive  force;  and,  on  the  other  hand, 
provided  the  person  were  listless  in  mind 
or  morbid  in  body,  it  contained  but  scant 
incentive  to  any  high,  self -forgetful  en- 
deavour.* 

*  He  is  a  graceless  biographer  who  quotes  from  parodies 
upon  the  work  of  his  author,  but  perhaps  a  sentence  from 
Mr.  Mallock's  mockery  may  help  to  distinguish  more  clearly 
the  misconception  which  Pater  suffered  in  the  thoughts  of 
many — a  misconception  not  unallied  to  a  real  weakness  in 
his  teaching  :  "The  end  of  life,"  says  Mr.  Rose,  in  a  voice 
like  a  lonely  flute,  "  is  the  consciousness  of  exquisite  living 
— in  the  making  our  own  each  highest  thrill  of  joy  that  the 
moment  offers  us — be  it  some  touch  of  colour  on  the  sea  or 
on  the  mountains,  the  early  dew  in  the  crimson  shadows 
of  a  rose,  or  the  shining  of  a  woman's  limbs  in  clear 
water — "  He  is  interrupted  by  some  confusion  among  the 
ladies. 

[117] 


WALTER    PATER 

This  Pater  seems  to  have  felt  and  set 
himself  to  correct.  Normally,  of  course, 
we  have  no  right  to  confuse  the  sentiments 
of  the  creative  artist  with  those  which  he 
puts  into  the  mouth  of  his  creature;  but 
with  Pater  and  INIarius  the  case  is  some- 
what exceptional.  In  the  whole  manner 
and  method  of  its  composition  "Marius" 
is  an  exposition  and  defence  of  a  mode  of 
life  which  not  only  stirred  the  author's 
deepest  interest  and  sympathy,  but,  as  we 
know  from  the  circumstances  of  his  own 
career,  was  an  actual  and  effective  ideal 
to  him.  By  the  time  Pater  set  himself  to 
the  writing  of  "IMarius"  the  natural 
ripening  of  his  mind  had  so  widened  the 
theory  that  it  bears  a  very  different  face. 
He  has  begmi  to  care  a  little  less  for  the 

[118] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

splendours  of  the  Renaissance,  and  more 
for  his  first  love,  the  chaster  beauties  of 
Hellenic  hfe  and  art.  In  the  "Renais- 
sance" he  might  have  seemed  almost  the 
orator  of  luxurious  wealth;  a  strange 
apostasy  for  one  who  set  out  as  a  disciple 
of  Ruskin!  But  now  all  this  is  changed, 
subdued,  refined.  The  Greek  spirit,  with 
its  engaging  naturalness,  simple  and  de- 
bonair, is  now  more  clearly  for  him  "the 
Sangrael  of  an  endless  pilgrimage." 

If  the  aesthetic  morality  of  the  "Re- 
naissance" might  almost  have  found  its 
arch-saint  in  such  a  person  as  Benvenuto 
Cellini  of  pious  memory,  we  see  in  "Ma- 
rius"  how  all  systems  of  morality,  in  the 
practice  of  their  wisest  exponents,  come 
together  toward  one  ideal  of  the  perfect 

[119] 


WALTER  PATER 

life.  Marius,  it  is  explicitly  stated,  makes 
not  pleasure,  but  fulness  of  life  his  aim 
and  end.  Furthermore,  the  emphasis  here 
is  shifted  to  rest  upon  austerer  and  more 
elevated  things.  The  chief  pursuit  of 
Marius  is  "the  art  of  so  relieving  the  ideal 
or  poetic  traits,  the  elements  of  distinc- 
tion in  our  daily  life — of  so  exclusively 
living  with  them — that  the  unadorned  re- 
mainder of  it,  the  drift  or  debris  of  our 
day,  comes  to  be  as  though  it  were  not." 
He  cares  most  now  for  the  poetic  beauty 
of  clear  thought,  "the  actually  aesthetic 
charm  of  a  cold  austerity  of  mind."  He 
sees  that  this  manner  of  life  might  come 
to  be  in  itself  a  kind  of  mystic  piety,  or 
religion,  that  it  would  demand  "energy, 
variety,  and  choice  of  experience,  includ- 

[  120] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

ing  noble  pain  and  sorrow  even,  loves 
such  as  those  in  the  exquisite  old  story  of 
Apuleius,  sincere  and  strenuous  forms  of 
the  moral  life  such  as  Seneca  and  Epic- 
tetus — whatever  form  of  human  life,  in 
short,  might  be  heroic,  impassioned, 
ideal."  Finally,  he  felt  that  this  mode  of 
life  would  exclude  much  dalliance  with 
the  lighter  joys  of  "settled,  sweet  epicu- 
rean life,"  for  it  would  mean  such  a  life 
as  that  which  we  have  seen  Pater  living  in 
his  Oxford  chambers,  "a  life  of  sober  in- 
dustry, of  industrious  study,  only  possible 
through  healthy  rule  keeping  clear  the 
eye  alike  of  body  and  soul." 

With  such  an  ideal  actually  and  dy- 
namically present  in  his  mind,  Marius 
speedily  arrived  at  the  idea  of  responsi- 

[121] 


WALTER  PATER 

bility.  His  mode  of  life  was  enjoined 
upon  him  by  a  sense  of  duty,  by  a  "cate- 
gorical imperative"  almost,  "to  offend 
against  which  brought  with  it  a  strange 
feeling  of  disloyalty  as  to  a  person." 
With  this  sense  of  obligation  firm  within 
him,  pagan  ]VIarius  came  to  the  last  stage 
in  the  philosophic  pilgrimage.  His  deep 
and  sombre  meditation  upon  the  variety 
of  the  world,  the  inwardness  and  grief  of 
life,  finally  conducted  him,  by  the  beaten 
path  of  experience,  to  a  kind  of  human 
idealism,  with  its  roots  struck  deep  into 
the  general  heart  of  the  race.  Like  that 
other  sceptic  Hume,  INIarius — and  Pater 
with  him — came  to  find  the  essence  and 
reality  of  life  in  sympathy.  Only  with 
Pater  this  mood  attained  a  kind  of  tran- 

[122] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

scendental  elevation  and  import.  In  the 
chapter  upon  "The  Will  as  Vision"  he 
subscribes  to  the  old  belief  of  the  mystics, 
now  upheld  by  many  thinkers  of  diverse 
sorts,  Kantian  philosophers,  orthodox  re- 
ligionists, experimental  psychologists,  that 
after  all  the  will  to  believe  is  the  whole 
matter. 

This  is  the  sum  of  Pater's  Cyrenaic 
philosophy  of  life.  Its  plea  was  for  a 
system  of  morals  as  living  and  flexible  as 
life  itself,  and  for  a  recognition  of  the 
importance  of  "being"  as  well  as  "doing." 
Such  considerations  have  perennial  value, 
but  especial  significance  in  an  age  like 
ours  when  it  is  so  fatally  easy  to  glorify 
over  much  great  aggregations  of  horse- 
power,   men    of   high    voltage,    and    the 

[123] 


WALTER  PATER 

efficient  life.  But  here  again  one  must 
guard  against  extremes.  Cyrenaicism,  in 
turn,  needs  the  correction  of  the  Gospel 
of  Work  which  Carlyle  preached  so  ton- 
ically.  Tristem  neminem  fecit  may  in- 
deed be  said  at  the  last  of  each  modern 
Marius,  but  can  one  always  add,  "He  was 
a  labourer  worthy  of  his  liire"? 

If  we  shift  our  point  of  view  a  little, 
and,  instead  of  contemplating  the  new 
Cyrenaicism  in  its  philosophic  and  ethical 
aspects,  consider  its  religious  implica- 
tions, we  shall  discover  some  significant 
facts. 

As,  in  philosophy,  Pater  progressed 
from  scepticism  to  an  idealism  rooted  in 
experience,  so  in  religion  he  moved  from 
virtual  paganism  toward  practical  Chris- 

[124] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

tianity.  In  the  "Renaissance"  he  values 
all  religions,  Paganism,  Catholicism, 
Protestant  Christianity,  as  he  values  all 
philosophies,  chiefly  for  the  romantic  ele- 
ments of  strangeness,  beauty,  or  passion 
in  them.  Like  that  earlier  Cyrenaic  Eu- 
hemerus,  he  has  his  own  philosophy  of 
religion.  He  has  tarried  with  German 
rationalists  and  French  biographers  of 
Jesus.  He  considers  all  religions  as 
stages  in  the  inexhaustible  activity  and 
creativeness  of  the  human  mind,  "in  which 
all  religions  alike  have  their  root  and  in 
which  all  are  reconciled,  just  as  the  fancies 
of  childhood  and  the  thoughts  of  old  age 
meet  and  are  laid  at  rest  in  the  personality 
of  the  individual."  And  through  themx 
all,  as  Pater  sees  it,  runs  the  warp  of 

[  125] 


WALTER    PATER 

Paganism.      In  the   essay   on  Winckel- 
mann  he  writes: 

"Still,  the  broad  foundation  in  mere 
hmnan  nature  of  all  religions  as  they 
exist  for  the  greatest  number  is  a  univer- 
sal pagan  sentiment,  a  paganism  which 
existed  before  the  Greek  religion,  and  has 
lingered  far  onward  into  the  Christian 
world,  ineradicable,  like  some  persistent 
vegetable  growth,  because  its  seed  is  an 
element  of  the  very  soil  out  of  which  it 
springs.  This  pagan  sentiment  measures 
the  sadness  with  which  the  human  mind  is 
filled,  whenever  its  thoughts  wander  far 
from  what  is  here  and  now.  It  is  beset  by 
notions  of  irresistible  natural  powers,  for 
the  most  part  ranged  against  man,  but  the 
secret  also  of  his   fortune,   making  the 

[126] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

earth  golden  and  the  grape  fiery  for  him. 
He  makes  gods  in  his  own  image,  gods 
smihng  and  flower-crowned  or  bleeding 
by  some  sad  fatality,  to  console  him  by 
their  wounds,  never  closed  from  genera- 
tion to  generation.  It  is  with  a  iiish  of 
home-sickness  that  the  thought  of  death 
presents  itself.  He  would  remain  at 
home  forever  on  the  earth  if  he  could;  as 
it  loses  its  colour  and  the  senses  fail,  he 
clings  ever  closer  to  it;  but  since  the 
mouldering  of  bones  and  flesh  must  go  on 
to  the  end,  he  is  careful  for  charms  and 
talismans,  that  may  chance  to  have  some 
friendly  power  in  them,  when  the  inevi- 
table shipwreck  comes.  Such  sentiment  is 
a  part  of  the  eternal  basis  of  all  rehgions, 
modified,  indeed,  by  changes  of  time  and 

[127] 


WALTER  PATER 

place,  but  indestructible,  because  its  root 
is  so  deep  in  the  earth  of  man's  nature. 
.  .  .  This  pagan  worship,  in  spite  of 
local  variations,  essentially  one,  is  an  ele- 
ment in  all  religions.  It  is  the  anodyne 
which  the  religious  principle,  like  one  ad- 
ministering opiates  to  tlie  incurable,  has 
added  to  the  law  which  makes  life  sombre 
for  the  vast  majority  of  mankind." 

But  notwithstanding  this  very  modern 
comprehensiveness,  Pater  always  pos- 
sessed a  lively  sympathy  with  ecclesias- 
tical tradition,  and  he  felt  especially  "the 
soothing  influence  which  the  Roman 
Church  has  often  exerted  over  spirits  too 
independent  to  be  its  subjects."  We  have 
seen  how  early  he  developed  a  love  for  its 
ritualistic    observances;    and    in    his    last 

[128] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

essay — on  Pascal,  a  significant  theme — 
he  recurs  to  the  well-worn  path  again. 
"Multitudes,"  he  says,  "in  every  genera- 
tion have  felt  at  least  the  aesthetic  charm 
of  the  rites  of  the  Catholic  Church.  For 
Pascal,  on  the  other  hand,  a  certain  puer- 
ility, a  certain  unprofitableness  in  them 
is  but  an  extra  trial  of  faith." 

In  spite  of  his  rationalising  tendency,  in 
spite  of  his  profuse  sympathies,  Pater,  like 
almost  all  English  men  of  letters  who  have 
not  died  young,  tended  as  he  grew  older 
toward  conservatism  and  a  trust  in  the 
Church  of  England.  Many  of  his  friends, 
indeed,  think  that  had  he  lived  but  a  little 
longer  he  would  have  taken  orders,  sought 
some  quiet  country  living,  and  so  spent 
the  remnant  of  his  days  in  the  odour  of 

[129] 


WALTER  PATER 

traditional  piety.  However  that  may  be, 
it  is  certain  that  in  all  his  work  after 
"Marius"  there  is  a  strain  of  feeling  quite 
other  than  the  fluid  religious  scepticism  of 
his  youth.  He  still  believes  in  the  useful- 
ness of  a  frequent  purgation  of  narrow 
religious  sentiment  to  promote  "a  kind 
of  cheerful  daylight  in  men's  tempers"; 
but  his  recognition  of  the  profound  mys- 
tery of  personality  eternally  underlying 
those  draughts  of  intellectual  day  gives 
all  his  later  thought  a  certain  mystical 
and  religious  colouring. 

But,  more  than  that,  his  thought  is  now 
distinctively  Christian,  though  his  specific 
position  is  still  obviously  latitudinarian. 
It  is  not  unlike  that  of  such  men  as  Mar- 
tineau,  but  with  a  slightly  greater  sympa- 

[  130] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

thy  for  all  that  is  meant  by  the  historic 
development  of  the  Church.  It  is  not  un- 
like the  attitude  of  Tennyson — of  the 
anwia  naturaliter  Christiana  everywhere 
— stretching  lame  hands  of  faith  and 
faintly  trusting  the  larger  hope.  Here 
again  we  may  let  him  speak  for  himself. 
In  the  review  of  "Robert  Elsmere"  he 
writes  of  certain  theological  problems 
with  unusual  candour  and  simplicity.  In 
a  passage  which,  in  view  of  all  the  facts, 
has  a  clear  autobiographic  ring,  he  says: 
"Robert  Elsmere  was  a  type  of  a  large 
class  of  minds  who  cannot  be  sure  that  the 
sacred  story  is  true.  It  is  philosophical, 
doubtless,  and  a  duty  to  the  intellect  to 
recognise  our  doubts,  to  locate  them,  per- 
haps to  give  them  practical  effect.     It 

[131] 


WALTER    PATER 

may  be  also  a  moral  duty  to  do  this.  But 
then  there  is  also  a  large  class  of  minds 
which  cannot  be  sure  it  is  false — minds  of 
very  various  degrees  of  conscientiousness 
and  intellectual  power,  up  to  the  highest. 
They  will  think  those  who  are  quite  sure 
it  is  false  unphilosophical  through  lack  of 
doubt.  For  their  part  they  make  allow- 
ance in  their  scheme  of  life  for  a  great 
possibility,  and  with  some  of  them  that 
bare  concession  of  possibility  (the  subject 
of  it  being  what  it  is)  becomes  the  most 
important  fact  in  the  world.  The  recog- 
nition of  it  straightway  opens  wide  the 
door  to  hope  and  love;  and  such  persons 
are,  as  we  fancy  they  always  will  be,  the 
nucleus  of  a  church.  Their  particular 
phase  of  doubt,  of  philosophic  uncertain- 

[132] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 

ty,  has  been  the  secret  of  milHons  of  good 
Christians,  multitudes  of  worthy  priests." 
In  such  passages  as  this  we  see  the  pe- 
rennial justification  of  that  Cyrenaicism 
so  dear  to  the  genial  heart  of  youth;  we 
see  that  the  devoted  and  whole-hearted 
quest  of  beauty,  provided  it  be  truly  de- 
voted and  whole-hearted,  may  not  lead 
one  far  astray  from  the  good ;  and,  finally, 
we  see  that  often  nowadays,  as  in  the  old 
transitional  times,  "the  true  preparation 
for  the  gospel  is  in  the  lives  of  such  as 
Marius."  Had  "Gaston  de  Latour"  been 
completed  we  should  have  had  a  confes- 
sion of  faith  even  more  impressive  and 
convincing.  That  stately  fragment  would 
have  shown  how  at  the  end  Christianity 
may  prevail  not  only  over  such  a  pagan- 

[133] 


WALTER  PATER 

ism  as  Marius  was  bred  in,  but  even  over 
a  scepticism  so  stubborn  and  elusive  as 
Montaigne's.  Quite  in  accord  with  all 
this  is  the  testimony  of  the  friend  who 
preached  the  memorial  sermon  from  which 
I  have  already  quoted: 

"His  whole  life  seemed  to  me  to  be  the 
gradual  consecration  of  an  exquisite  sense 
of  beauty  to  the  highest  ends;  an  almost 
literally  exact  advance  through  the  stages 
of  admiration  in  the  Symposium ^  till  at 
last  he  reached  the  sure  haven,  the  One 
Source  of  all  that  is  fair  and  good."  All 
of  which  is  bound  together  into  the  unity 
of  imaginative  insight  in  the  ultimate 
poem  of  Lionel  Johnson,  one  of  the  truest 
of  Pater's  student  friends: 

[  134  ] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 
WALTER   PATER 
Gracious  God  rest  him,  he  who  toiled  so  well 

Secrets  of  grace  to  tell 
Graciously;  as   the  awed  rejoicing  priest 

Officiates  at   the  feast. 
Knowing,  how  deep  within   the  liturgies 

Lie  hid  the  mysteries. 
Half  of  a  passionately  pensive  soul 

He  showed  us,  not  the  whole; 
Who  loved  him  best,  they  best,  they  only,  knerv 

The  deeps,  they  might  not  view; 
That,  which  was  private  between  God  and  him; 

To  others,  jtistly   dim. 
Calm  Oxford  autumns  and  preluding  springs! 

To  me  your  memory  brings 
Delight   upon  delight,  but  chiefest  one; 

The  thought  of  Oxford's  son. 
Who  gave  me  of  his  welcome  and  his  praise. 

When   white  were  still  my  days; 
[135] 


WALTER    PATER 
Ere  death  had  left  life  darkling^  nor  had  sent 

Lament    upon   lament: 
Ere  sorrorv  told  me,  how  I  loved  my  lost. 

And  bade  me  base  love's  cost. 
Scholarship's   constant  saint,  he  kept   her  light 

In  him  divinely  white; 
With  cloistral  jealousness  of  ardour  strove 

To  guard  her  sacred  grove. 
Inviolate  by  unworldly  feet,  nor  paced 

In  desecrating  haste. 
Oh,  sweet  grove  smiling  of  that  wisdom,  brought 

From  arduous  ways  of  thought; 
Oh,  golden  patience  of  that  travailing  soul. 

So  hungered  for  the  goal. 
And  vowed  to  keep,  through  subtly  vigilant  pain. 

From    pastime   on   the   plain; 
Enamoured  of  the  difficult  mountain  air 

Up  beauty's  Hill  of  Prayer! 
[  136  ] 


"THE    NEW    CYRENAICISM" 
Stern  is  the  faith  of  art,  right  stern,  and  he 

Loved  her  severity. 
Momentous  things  he  prized,  gradual  and  fair. 

Births  of  passionate  air: 
Some  austere  setting  of  an  ancient  sun. 

Its  midday  glories  done. 
Over  a  silent  melancholy  sea 

In  sad  serenity: 
Some  delicate  dawning  of  a  new  desire. 

Distilling  fragrant  fire 
On  hearts  of  men  prophetically  fain 

To  feel  earth  young  again: 
Some  strange  rich  passage  of  the  dreaming  earth. 

Fulfilled  with  warmth  and  worth. 
Ended,  his  services:  yet,  albeit,  farewell 

Tolls  the  faint  vesper  bell. 
Patient  beneath  his  Oxford  trees  and  towers 

He  still  is  gently  ours: 
[137  1 


WALTER  PATER 

Hierarch  of  the  spirit,  pure  and  strong. 

Worthy   Uranian   song. 
Gracious  God  keep  him:  and  God  grant  to  me 

By  miracle  to  see 
That  unforgettably  most  gracious  friend^ 

In  the  never-ending  end. 


[138] 


VI 

LAST  YEARS 
In  1891  and  1892  Pater  delivered  at 
Oxford,  to  young  students  of  philosophy 
there,  a  course  of  lectures  upon  the  Aca- 
demic philosophy.  The  following  year 
these  were  printed  in  a  single  volume  un- 
under  the  title  "Plato  and  Platonism." 
More  than  any  other  of  his  books  this  ex- 
hibits the  excellence  of  his  scholarship, 
and  the  rich  strength  of  his  intellectual 
powers,  at  their  ripest  period,  employed 
in  the  scholarly  vitalisation  of  a  difficult 
theme.  The  Platonic  philosophy,  con- 
ceived not  as  a  system,  but  as  a  group  of 
tendencies,  is  outlined  against  a  back- 
ground of  Greek  life,  realised  in  all  liis- 
toric    and    humane    aspects    and    poetic 

[139] 


WALTER  PATER 

phases.  The  genesis  of  these  tendencies 
out  of  the  earher  systems  of  Pythagoras, 
HeracHtus,  and  the  Eleatics  is  traced  with 
remarkable  insight,  yet  with  equally  re- 
markable sanity  and  moderation.  Plato's 
own  temperament,  the  furnishing  of  his 
mind,  his  intricate  relation  to  Socrates, 
are  all  portrayed  with  that  singularly  in- 
timate interpretative  power  which  we 
have  seen  as  the  chief  trait  of  Pater's 
prose.  In  form,  in  the  carefully  consid- 
ered unity  in  variety  of  its  structure,  in 
the  unusually  self-denying  yet  exquisitely 
wrought  style,  it  is  perhaps  the  most 
thoroughly  satisfactory  of  all  his  works. 
Jowett  himself  was  among  the  first  to  ex- 
press to  Pater  his  profound  admiration 
for  the  learning  and  insight  displayed  in 

[  140] 


LAST    YEARS 

the  book,  and  to  tender  his  congratula- 
tions upon  its  pubhcation. 

In  1893  Pater  gave  up  the  house  at 
Kensington  and  took  his  household  goods 
and  gods  back  to  Oxford.  He  has  often 
been  described  as  he  appeared  at  this  time. 
He  is  pictured  as  "a  man  of  medium 
height,  rather  heavily  built,  with  a  pecu- 
liar though  slight  stoop.  His  face  was 
pale,  and  perhaps  a  dark  and  very  thick 
moustache  made  it  seem  even  more  so." 
His  expression  is  said  to  have  had  in  re- 
pose a  singular  impassiveness,  like  that 
of  "a  Bismarck  turned  dreamer."  But 
in  spite  of  this  impassiveness  he  was  a 
wonderfully  winsome  companion  to  his 
friends.  As  is  the  wont  of  the  Dutcli 
countenance,  his  face  never  lost  a  certain 

[141] 


WALTER    PATER 

pleasing  youthfulness.  His  manners, 
though  reserved,  were  simple  and  kindly, 
and  often  playful.  He  intensely  disliked 
all  noise  and  extravagance;  and  his  own 
voice,  as  all  who  knew  him  agree,  was  low 
and  musical.  He  was  a  serene  compan- 
ion, and  people  liked  to  be  with  him.  Yet 
he  never  married.  One  wonders  a  little, 
as  he  wondered  at  Pascal's  single  state, 
"Was  it  mere  oddity  of  genius?  Or  was 
it  the  last  fine,  dainty  touch  of  diiference 
from  ordinary  people  and  their  motives?" 
But  it  was  not  for  him  to  enjoy  much 
longer  the  academic  life  that  he  loved,  or 
to  taste  deeper  of  the  joy  of  his  grow- 
ing fame  and  influence.  In  July,  1894, 
he  fell  sick  of  a  rheumatic  fever.  It  was 
not  thought  to  be  serious;  ere  long  he  be- 

[142] 


LAST    YEARS 

came  convalescent  and  was  permitted  to 
sit  up  and  look  out  upon  the  world  of  his 
delight.  Then,  suddenly,  came  a  quick 
relapse,  and  he  died  on  July  30,  1894. 
He  was  in  the  fifty-fifth  year  of  his  life, 
yet  it  seemed  like  the  death  of  a  young 
man. 

It  is  evident  that  the  life  we  have  passed 
in  review  was  like  that  of  Gray,  intrin- 
sically an  academic  product.  But,  more 
than  Gray,  Pater  "spoke  out."  Like  the 
earlier  scholar  he  was  a  little  indolent, 
and,  perhaps,  rather  too  much  disposed  to 
care  for  the  suavities  of  life;  but  his  hu- 
manism meant  too  much  to  him,  his  sense 
of  the  burden  of  a  message  was  too  keen 
to   let   him   be   content    with    a   meagre 

[  143  ] 


WALTER    PATER 

product.  There  was  a  fine  health  and 
sanity  in  his  hfe,  yet  he  was  much  of  the 
dreamer  withal;  he  had  something  of  the 
"inward  tacitness  of  mind"  of  the  born 
mystic,  united  to  a  wistful  and  humor- 
some  eagerness  to  know  and  experience 
everything.  Hence,  while  his  bodily  self 
remained  for  the  most  part,  like  Mon- 
taigne's, with  seeming  indolence  at  home, 
his  mind  was  bent  toward  a  continual  ob- 
servation of  new  and  unknown  things, 

Come  goite  die  pensa  a  sua  rriviinino, 
Che  va  col  cuore   e  col  corpo  dimora  : 

Like  Virgil  and  like  Kant,  he  is  one  of 
the  striking  examples  of  the  power  of  the 
mind  to  transcend   space   and  time  and 

[  144] 


LAST    YEARS 

make  a  home-staying  man  a  citizen  of  the 
world.  As  Kant  at  Konigsberg  wrote 
his  marvellously  exact  accounts  of  the 
South  Sea  Islanders,  so  Pater  at  Oxford 
revisited  the  Lacedaemonian  state. 

Now  to  a  man  of  this  sensitive  and  re- 
ceptive humour,  his  cloistered  life,  relieved 
by  social  amenities,  but  not  broken  by 
affairs,  had  manifest  advantages.  It  af- 
forded opportunity  for  the  clarification 
and  generalisation  of  his  intimations  of 
humanity;  it  reinforced  them  and  gave 
them  precision  and  breadth  by  carefully 
cultivated  scholarship.  He  cared,  too,  for 
other  things  beside  reading  and  study. 
We  must  not  forget  that  "lust  of  the  eye" 
in  him,  so  desirous  of  beauty.  He  cared, 
perhaps  not  always  wisely,  for  all  strong 

[  145  ] 


WALTER    PATER 

impressions  from  art  and  nature,  for  all 
that  is  beautiful,  or  strange,  or  vivid — for 
pretty  coins,  for  tales  of  adventure  and 
hair-breadth  escape — and  for  the  sudden 
intimacies  of  friendship.  But  this  absorb- 
ing power  of  the  true  humanistic  tem- 
perament made  him  the  heir  of  the  sorrow 
of  the  world  as  well  as  of  its  beauty  and 
joy.  "Variety  of  aiFection  in  a  household 
in  which  many  relations  had  lived  to- 
gether had  brought  variety  of  sorrow." 
So,  in  his  work,  by  a  kind  of  pervading 
insinuation,  he  makes  one  taste  the  springs 
of  tears  in  the  very  nature  of  things. 
But  why  strive  to  refine  our  impression  ? 

Ter  frustra  comprensa  mamis  effugit  imago. 

His  personality  was  of  the  sort  that  is 

[146] 


LAST    YEARS 

best  felt  in  the  style  of  his  work,  better 
portrayed  by  analogy  and  distinction 
than  by  definition.  He  was  an  idealist, 
yet  not  of  the  spiritual  family  of  Sidney 
and  Shelley;  he  lacked  their  youthful  en- 
thusiasm and  exuberance;  and  he  was  far 
too  sophisticate  to  embrace  with  passion 
the  first  fair  Vision  of  Truth  that  crossed 
his  path.  He  was  never,  like  them,  doc- 
trinaire. He  was,  also,  too  full  a  man  to 
fall  into  the  rough  and  ready  generalis- 
ing which  is  the  most  frequent  cause  of 
popularity,  as  it  is  of  cock-sureness  and 
energy  in  style.  Nor  was  he,  precisely,  of 
the  school  of  Coleridge.  He  held,  rather 
oddly,  that  Coleridge  took  himself  and 
the  world  quite  too  seriously,  and  would 
have  been  benefited  by  a  touch  of  gently 

[147] 


WALTER  PATER 

humourous  unconcern.  In  spite  of  his 
sense  of  duty,  his  friendships,  his  pity,  his 
ardent  humanism,  one  always  feels  under- 
lying Pater's  work,  as  it  underlies  Da 
Vinci's  secular  masterpiece,  something-  of 
this  gently  humourous  unconcern.  He 
saw  the  burden  of  the  mystery  with  a  sad 
lucidity  of  view.  Instead  of  being  pas- 
sionately disturbed  by  it,  he  was  pleas- 
antly interested  as  he  sat  at  ease  in  his 
ivory  tower.  He  possessed  a  large  por- 
tion of  that  modernity  which  finds  its 
highest  cause  for  rejoicing  in  that  "the 
world  is  so  full  of  a  number  of  things," 
and  he  shared  in  the  subtilely  optimistic 
view  of  evil,  that  properly  to  understand 
all  is  to  forgive  all — tout  com  prendre 
c'est  tout  pardonner.     So  he  came,  one 

[148] 


LAST    YEARS 

thinks,  like  the  object  of  one  of  his  own 
characterisations,  to  "a  kind  of  moral  sex- 
lessness,  a  kind  of  impotence,  an  ineiFec- 
tual  wholeness  of  nature,  yet  with  a  true 
beauty  and  significance  of  its  own." 

He  has  never  been  in  any  sense  a  popu- 
lar writer.  That  nimierous  monstrosity, 
the  novel-reading  public,  has  never  dis- 
covered him.  The  well-meaning  persons 
who,  like  the  gay  boy  in  Stevenson,  find 
in  the  Athenceum  only  "the  most  awful 
swipes  about  poetry  and  the  use  of 
globes,"  if  they  attempt  Pater  at  all,  find 
him  uncongenial  and  difficult  to  under- 
stand. In  a  sense  he  is  a  writer's  writer, 
still  there  are  some  even  among  the  elect 
of  letters  who  have  a  distaste  for  what 
they  term  his  "pulpy"  periods,  "his  lack 

[U9] 


WALTER    PATER 

of  virility  and  paucity  of  ideas."  "More 
matter  and  less  art!"  has  been  the  critics' 
cry.  Yet  if  this  essay  has  been  in  any 
degree  successful  in  apprehending  the 
peculiar  individuality  of  his  work  it 
should  be  clear  that  such  objections  are 
beside  the  mark.  Precisely  such  writing 
as  his,  so  exquisitely  modulated,  so  infi- 
nitely expressive,  has  I  know  not  what 
cloistral  value  in  this  insistent  worldly 
present.  It  is  this  in  him  which  has  won 
him  his  potent  influence  over  the  minds  of 
young  persons  of  a  certain  type.  There 
are  critics  who  have  sometimes  seen  in  him 
the  inspiration  of  a  school  of  sentimental- 
ists and  stylists  now  much  with  us.  This 
is  a  perverse  judgment,  for  the  most 
typical  men  of  this  set  have  much  more 

[150] 


LAST    YEARS 

in  common  with  De  Quincey's  tradition 
in   prose   than   they   have   with    Pater's, 
while  many  of  them  prefer  a  stiff,  mere- 
tricious brocade  to  the  softer  colour  and 
sinuous  folds  of  our  author's  garment  of 
style.    It  is  indeed  true  that  many  young 
writers  who  aspire  to  write  scholarly,  ex- 
pressive English,  are  diligently  studying 
Pater,  just  as  they  study  Stevenson  and 
Newman  and  Addison  and  the  earher  and 
more  robust  masters;  and  in  a  Taylorian 
lecture    at    Oxford    the    French    stylist 
Bourget  gave  eloquent  expression  to  the 
obligation    of    French    writers    to    the 
''par fait  prosateur.'"    But  his  real  school, 
if  he  has  such  a  thing,  is  to  be  found 
among  those  who  have  read  him  not  as  a 
stylist,  but  as  a  scholar  and  humanist,  who 

[151] 


WALTER    PATER 

have  responded  to  his  interest  in  some 
field  of  their  own  labour  or  delight.  And 
among  these  there  is  small  trace  of  the 
effeminacy,  uneasy  self-consciousness,  and 
weariness  of  life  which  are  the  marks  of 
those  pseudo-Paterians  whom  some  have 
thought  to  be  his  true  followers. 

The  final  merit  of  Pater's  work  is  its 
admirable  educative  and  refining  tend- 
ency. While  one  may  fail  to  agree  with 
this  or  that  opinion,  or  may  tire  of  the 
subtile,  intensive  style,  he  who  will  ap- 
proach him  sympathetically  may  sweeten 
the  day  by  the  reading,  and  be  sure  of 
taking  from  his  pages  a  lively  sense  of 
the  fulness  and  colour  of  the  world,  and 
a  fresh  impulse  to  a  gracefully  ordered, 
thoughtful  life. 

[152] 


CHRONOLOGY 

1839 
Walter  Pater  is  born. 

1853 
Goes  to  King's  School  in  Canterbury. 

1858 
Matriculates  at  Queen's  College,  Oxford. 

1862 
Graduates  B.  A.  and  becomes  a  private  tutor. 

1864 
Proceeds  M.  A.  and  is  elected  Fellow  of  Brase- 
nose  College. 

1865 
Visits  Italy  for  the  first  time. 

1866 
"Coleridge,"  appeared  in  the   Westminster  Re- 
view, January;  reprinted  in  "Appreciations,"  1889- 

1867 
"Winckelmann,"    appeared   in    the    Westminster 
Review,    January;    reprinted    in    "Studies    in    the 
Renaissance,"  1873. 

1868 
"Esthetic    Poetry,"    written,   first   published    in 
"Appreciations,"  1889- 

[153] 


WALTER  PATER 

1869 
"Notes   on    Leonardo    da    Vinci,"    appeared   in 
Fortnightly     Review,     November;     reprinted     in 
"Studies  in  the  Renaissance/'  1873. 

1870 
"Sandro  Botticelli/'  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Re- 
view, October;  reprinted  in  "Studies  in  the  Renais- 
sance/'  1873. 

1871 

"Pico  della  Mirandola/'  appeared  in  Fortnightly 
Review,  October;  reprinted  in  "Studies  in  the 
Renaissance,"  1873. 

"Poetry  of  Michelangelo,"  appeared  in  Fort- 
nightly Review,  November;  reprinted  in  "Studies 
in  the  Renaissance,"   1873. 

1873 
"Studies  in  the  History  of  the  Renaissance," 
published  by  Messrs.  Macmillan,  contained  in  ad- 
dition to  the  essays  already  mentioned,  studies  of 
"Aucassin  and  Nicolette"  (in  later  editions  entitled 
"Two  Early  French  Stories"),  "Luca  della  Rob- 
bia/'  "Joachim  du  Bellay,"  and  a  "Conclusion." 

[154] 


CHRONOLOGY 

1874 
"Wordsworth,"  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Review, 
April;  "Measure  for  Measure,"  ajDpeared  in  Fort- 
nightly Review,  November;  both  reprinted  in  "Ap- 
preciations," 1889. 

1875 

Review  of  "Symonds'  Renaissance  in  Italy,  the 
Age  of  the  Despots,"  Academy,  July  31. 

"Demeter  and  Persephone,"  delivered  as  lectures 
at  the  Birmingham  and  Midland  Institute,  ap- 
peared in  the  Fortnightly  Review,  January  and 
February,  1876;  reprinted  in  "Greek  Studies," 
1895. 

1876 

"Romanticism,"  appeared  in  Macmillan's  Maga- 
zine, November;  reprinted  as  "Postscript"  in  "Ap- 
preciations," 1889- 

"A  Study  of  Dionysus,"  appeared  in  Fortnightly 
Review,  December;  reprinted  in  "Greek  Studies," 
1895. 

1877 
"The   School   of  Giorgione,"  appeared   in  Fort- 
nightly  Review,   October;   reprinted   in  third   edi- 
tion of  "The  Renaissance,"  1888. 

[155] 


WALTER    PATER 

"The  Renaissance:  Studies  in  Art  and  Poetry," 
second  edition.     "Conclusion"  omitted. 

1878 

"The  Child  in  the  House,"  appeared  in  Mac- 
millan's  Magazine,  August;  reprinted,  privately, 
by  Mr.  H.  Daniel,  1894,  and  in  "Miscellaneous 
Studies,"  1895. 

"Charles  Lamb,"  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Re- 
view, October;  reprinted  in  "Appreciations,"  1889. 

"Love's  Labour's  Lost,"  written;  appeared  in 
Macmillan's  Magazine,  December,  1885;  reprinted 
in  "Appreciations,"  1889- 

"The  Bacchanals  of  Euripides,"  written;  ap- 
peared in  Macmillan's  Magazine,  May,  1889;  re- 
printed in  Tyrrell's  edition  of  the  "Bacchae,"  1892; 
reprinted  in   "Greek   Studies,"   1895. 

1880 
"The  Beginnings  of  Greek  Sculpture,"  appeared 
in  Fortnightly  Review,  February  and   March;   re- 
printed in  "Greek  Studies,"  1895. 

"The  Marbles  of  vEgina,"  appeared  in  Fort- 
nightly Review,  April;  reprinted  in  "Greek 
Studies,"  1895. 

[156] 


CHRONOLOGY 

1881 
Pater  begins  the  composition  of  "Marius." 

1882 
He  spends  the  winter  in  Rome. 

1883 
"Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti/'  written;  appeared  in 
"Appreciations/'  1889- 

1885 

"Marius  the  Epicurean/'  published  by  Messrs. 
Macmillan. 

"A  Prince  of  Court  Painters/'  appeared  in  Mac- 
millan's  Magazine,  October;  reprinted  in  "Imagi- 
nary Portraits/'  1887. 

1886 

Pater  removes  his  household  to  Kensington. 

Reviews  "Four  Books  for  Students  of  English 
Literature/'  Guardian,  February  17;  reprinted  in 
"Essays  from  the  Guardian/'  1896. 

Reviews  "Amiel's  Journal  Intime/'  Guardian, 
March  17;  reprinted  in  "Essays  from  the  Guard- 
ian/' 1896. 

"Feuillet's  'La  Morte/ "  written;  published  in 
second  edition  of  "Appreciations/'  1890. 

[157] 


WALTER    PATER 

■'Sir  Thomas  Browne,"  written;  published  in 
"Appreciations/'    1889- 

"Sebastian  Van  Storck/'  appeared  in  Macmillan's 
Magazine,  March;  reprinted  in  "Imaginary  Por- 
traits," 1887. 

"Denys  L'Auxerrois,"  appeared  in  Macmillan's 
Magazine,  October;  reprinted  in  "Imaginary  Por- 
traits," 1887. 

1887 

Reviews  "Symons'  An  Introduction  to  the  Study 
of  Browning,"  Guardian,  November  9>  reprinted  in 
"Essays  from  the  Guardian,"   1896. 

Reviews  "Lemaitre's  Serenus  and  other  Tales," 
in  Macmillan's  Magazine,  November. 

"Duke  Carl  of  Rosenmold,"  appeared  in  Mac- 
millan's Magazine,  May;  reprinted  in  "Imaginary 
Portraits,"  published  by  Messrs.  Macmillan. 

1888 
Reviews  "Robert  Elsmere,"  Guardian,  March  28. 
Reviews  "Doran's  Annals  of  the  English  Stage," 
Guardian,  June  27;  both  reprinted  in  "Essays  from 
the  Guardian,"  1896. 

Reviews  "Life  and  Letters  of  Flaubert,"  Pall 
Mall  Gazette,  August  25. 

[158] 


CHRONOLOGY 

"Gaston  de  Latour,"  first  five  chapters  appeared 
in  Macmillan's  Magazine,  from  June  to  October; 
reprinted  in  1896. 

"Style/'  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Review,  De- 
cember; reprinted  in  "Appreciations,"   1889- 

"The  Renaissance/'  third  edition,  published  by 
Messrs.  Macmillan,  with  the  "Conclusion"  revised 
and  reinstated. 

1889 

Reviews  "The  Complete  Poetical  Works  of 
Wordsworth/'  ed.  J.  Morley,  Athenceum,  Janu- 
ary 26. 

Reviews  three  editions  of  "Wordsworth/'  Guard- 
ian, February  27- 

Reviews  "Fabre's  Norine,"  Guardian,  June  12; 
both  reprinted  in  "Essays  from  the  Guardian/' 
1896. 

Reviews  "Correspondence  de  Gustave  Flaubert/' 
Athenceum,  August  3. 

Reviews  "Fabre's  Toussaint  Galabru,"  Nine- 
teenth Century,  April. 

Reviews  "Symons'  Days  and  Nights,"  Pall  Mall 
Gazette,  March  23. 

Reviews  "It  Is  Thyself/'  Pall  Mall  Gazette, 
April  15. 

[159] 


WALTER    PATER 

"Hippolytus  Veiled/'  appeared  in  Macmillan's 
Magazine,  August;  reprinted  in  "Greek  Studies," 
1895. 

"Giordano  Bruno/'  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Re- 
view, August;  revised  and  reprinted  as  Chapter 
VII.  of  "Gaston  de  Latour/'  1896. 

Reviews  "Lilly's  A  Century  of  Revolution/' 
Nineteenth  Century,  December. 

"Appreciations/'  with  an  "Essay  on  Style/'  pub- 
lished by  Messrs.  Macmillan,  containing  the  essays 
mentioned  above  with  the  addition  of  "Shake- 
speare's English  Kings." 

1890 

Reviews  "The  Contes  of  M.  Augustin  Filon/' 
Guardian,  July  \Q,  and  "Mr.  Gosse's  Poems/' 
Guardian,  October  29;  both  reprinted  in  "Essays 
from  the  Guardian/'  1896. 

"Art  Notes  in  North  Italy/'  appeared  in  New 
Review,  November;  reprinted  in  "Miscellaneous 
Studies/'  1895. 

"Prosper  Merimee/'  delivered  as  lecture  at  Ox- 
ford in  November,  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Review, 
December;  reprinted  in  "Miscellaneous  Studies/' 
1895. 

[160] 


CHRONOLOGY 

"Appreciations,"  second  edition,  omitting  "Es- 
thetic Poetry,"  and  including  "Feuillet's  La 
Morte,"  published  by  Messrs.  Macmillan. 

1891 
Reviews  "Dorian  Gray,"  Bookman,  November. 
Begins    his    course    of    lectures    on    "Plato    and 

Platonism." 

1892 

Contributes  the  "Introduction  to  the  Purgatory 
of  Dante  Alighieri,"  by  C.  L.  Shadwell. 

"The  Genius  of  Plato,"  appeared  in  Contempo- 
rary Revierv,  February;  reprinted  as  Chapter  VI.  of 
"Plato  and  Platonism,"  1893. 

"A  Chapter  on  Plato,"  appeared  in  Macmillan's 
Magazine,  May;  reprinted  as  Chapter  L  of  "Plato 
and  Platonism,"  1893. 

"Lacedaemon,"  appeared  in  Contemporary  Re- 
vierv, June;  reprinted  as  Chapter  VIIL  of  "Plato 
and  Platonism,"  1893. 

"Emerald  Uthwart,"  appeared  in  New  Review, 
June  and  July;  reprinted  in  "Miscellaneous 
Studies,"   1895. 

"Raphael,"  delivered  as  a  lecture  at  Oxford, 
August;  appeared  in  Fortnightly  Review,  October; 
reprinted  in  "Miscellaneous  Studies,"  1895. 

[161] 


WALTER    PATER 

1893 

Pater  removes  his  household  to  Oxford. 

Contributes  "Mr.  George  Moore  as  an  Art 
Critic"  to  Daily  Chronicle,  June  10. 

"Apollo  in  Picardy,"  appeared  in  Harper's  Mag- 
azine, November;  reprinted  in  "Miscellaneous 
Studies/'  1895. 

"Plato    and    Platonism/'    published    by    Messrs. 

Macmillan. 

1894 

"The  Age  of  Athletic  Prizemen,"  appeared  in 
Contemporary  Review,  February;  reprinted  in 
"Greek  Studies,"  1895. 

"Some  Great  Churches  in  France,  (l)  Notre 
Dame  d' Amiens,  (2)  Vezelaj^,"  appeared  in  Nine- 
teenth Century,  March  and  June;  reprinted  in 
"Miscellaneous   Studies,"   1895. 

"Pascal,"  written  for  delivery  as  a  lecture  at 
Oxford  in  July,  appeared  in  the  Contemporary  Re- 
vierv,  December;  reprinted  in  "Miscellaneous 
Studies,"  1895. 

Walter  Pater  died,  July  30. 

1895 
"Miscellaneous   Studies  "   and   "Greek   Studies," 
containing   the   essays   mentioned   above,    are   pre- 

[162] 


CHRONOLOGY 

pared  for  the  press  by  Mr.  C.  L.  Shadwell,  and 
published  by  Messrs.  Macmillan. 

1896 
"Essays  from  the  Guardian/'  published  privately 
at  the  Chiswick  Press.  "Gaston  de  Latour,  an  Un- 
finished Romance,"  with  contents  as  above,  slightly 
augmented  from  manuscript,  prepared  for  the 
press  by  Mr.  C.  L.  Shadwell,  and  published  by 
Messrs.  Macmillan 


THE   END 


[163] 


IN   THE  SAME  SEfUES 


BRET    HARTE 
BY    H.   W.    BOYNTON 


*'  An  admirable  piece  of  condensed  biographical  writing 
...  a  truthful  study.  .  .  .  Far  and  away  the  best 
(study  of  Bret  Harte)  that  has  yet  come  to  us,  and  delight- 
ful reading  after  the  mass  of  uncritical,  gushing,  senti- 
mental biography,"      N.  Y.  Outlook. 


"  Very  well  worth  reading,  especially  by  those  who  want 
a  fair  view  of  Harte  that  shall  not  make  them  dislike  him." 

The  Nation. 

*'  Will  be  welcomed  by  all  admirers  of  the  poet." 

The  Churchman. 


"A  sane  little  work,  and  gives  in  brief  compass  just 
those  things  one  wants  to  know  about  this  famous  Uterary 
man,  for  the  treatment  is  sane  and  sympathetic." 

Christian  Herald. 

[ OVER  ] 


JUST  PUBLISHED 

CHARLES    DUDLEY   WARNER 
BY  MRS.   JAMES  T.    FIELDS 


IN  PREPARATION 

CHARLES  ALGERNON  SWINBURNE 

By  George  Edward  Woodberry 
Author  of  "  American  Literature,"  "  Life  of  Hawthorne,"  "PoemB,"  etc. 


PRESS  COMMENTS  ON  THE  SERIES 

"  Promises  to  be  a  useful  as  well  as  a  beautiful  series. 
.  .  .  The  publishers  who  have  put  it  forth  have  done 
notably  good  work  in  bookmaking  of  late  and  these  vol- 
umes    .     .     .     are  fitted  to  adorn  any  shelves. 

Providence  Journal. 

"  In  typographical  make-up  these  volumes  far  excel  the 
other  literary  monographs  on  the  market." 

Philadelphia  Press. 

"  The  volumes  are  made  up  with  aU  the  taste  which  dis- 
tinguishes the  books  that  come  from  their  publisher  and 
promise  well."     The  Independent. 

♦'  Begins  not  only  well  but  brilliantly.  Its  future  issues 
will  receive  close  attention,  thanks  to  the  sterling  qualities 
of  its  first  two  issues.     N.  Y.  Mail  and  Express. 

"  These  handy  volumes  are  just  the  thing  for  busy  people 
who  like  to  know  something  about  the  men  of  letters  of  the 
passing  generation."     Church  Standard. 


FACItlTY 


^^    000  461058 


